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jordansissel
fpm
Ruby2011–2025
jordansissel / fpm

fpm

Effing package management! Build packages for multiple platforms (deb, rpm, etc) with great ease and sanity.

Developer Tools
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
67Distinct people
80Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
11.5KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Effing package management! Build packages for multiple platforms (deb, rpm, etc) with great ease and sanity.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

Yeah, there's more than a whiff of entitlement to that phrasing. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend looking at fpm for packaging. Unless you're doing something weird or…

_lqaf used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 10:49:33 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year80 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2011-08-27 17:21:25 UTC to 2025-05-26 22:47:13 UTC.

0510152011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments20112012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 0 submissions, 6 comments2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 8 mentions; 0 submissions, 8 comments2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 14 mentions; 0 submissions, 14 comments2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 11 mentions; 2 submissions, 9 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 9 mentions; 0 submissions, 9 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 0 submissions, 5 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments20182019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 0 submissions, 6 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 2 submissions, 3 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20112011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20122012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC606
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC808
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC14014
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC1129
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC909
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC505
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC606
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC523
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

From the project README

An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.

Read the project’s introduction
fpm The goal of fpm is to make it easy and quick to build packages such as rpms, debs, OSX packages, etc. fpm, as a project, exists to help you build packages, therefore: If fpm is not helping you make packages easily, then there is a bug in fpm. If you are having a bad time with fpm, then there is a bug in fpm. If the documentation is confusing, then this is a bug in fpm. If there is a bug in fpm, then we can work together to fix it. If you wish to report a bug/problem/whatever, I welcome you to do on the project issue tracker. You can find out how to use fpm in the documentation. You can learn how to install fpm on your platform in the installation guide. Project Principles Community: If a newbie has a bad time, it's a bug. Engineering: Make it work, then make it right, then make it fast. Capabilities: If it doesn't do a thing today, we can make it do it tomorrow. Backstory Sometimes packaging is done wrong (because you can't do it right for all situations), but small tweaks can fix it. And sometimes, there isn't a package available for the tool you need. And sometimes if you ask "How do I get python 3.9 on RHEL 8?" some unhelpful trolls will tell you to "Use another distro" Further, job switches have me flipping between Ubuntu and CentOS. These use two totally different package systems with completely different packaging policies and support tools. Learning both was painful and confusing. I want to save myself (and you) that pain in the future. It should be easy to say "here's my install dir and here's some dependencies; please make a package" The Solution - FPM I wanted a simple way to create packages without needing to memorize too much. I wanted a tool to help me deliver software with minimal steps or training. The goal of FPM is to be able to easily build platform-native packages. With fpm, you can do many things, including: Creating packages easily (deb, rpm, freebsd, etc) Tweaking existing packages (removing files, changing metadata/dependencies) Stripping pre/post/maintainer scripts from packages Things that should work Sources: gem (even autodownloaded for you) python modules (autodownload for you) pear (also downloads for you) directories tar(.gz) archives rpm deb node packages (npm) pacman (ArchLinux) packages Targets: deb rpm solaris freebsd tar directories Mac OS X .pkg files (osxpkg) pacman (ArchLinux) packages
Read the full README on GitHub

What Hacker News says

11 sources
blubbi2·Nov 15, 2015
As I said earlier, it wasn't my intention to name it after a weapon. That being said, it's a three letter name. It's very unlikely NOT to run into naming conflicts here. edge - taken by Microsoft jpm - JPMorgan ppm - taken by Perl package manager: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl_package_manager fpm - taken by Effing package management: https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm bpm - beats per minute ayp - terrible to type, although taken by "Adequate Yearly Progress": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adequate_Yearly_Progress nnm - What happens when it's no longer new? Just in Germany for example there are a ton of companies called ISIS (just google "ISIS GmbH"). Being offended by a three letter shell command seems a bit over the top to me to be honest. Edit: I won't respond to further comments on the naming issue. It wasn't my intention to name
Read the rest
it after a weapon. As I said earlier, I will change the name as soon as anyone proposes a better one.
In Show HN: ied – an alternative package manager for Node
mtrn·Jun 25, 2015
I tried a few things myself, like fpm[1], rpmvenv[2] and lately pex[3] - but so far, I haven't found something, that I would call solid and simple. We have constrained deployment environments that do not allow most of the tools, that would ease the process on a development machine. Basically, I need a deb or rpm. I have some hopes to wrap a pex into deb/rpm, but I would not call this approach simple. That's unfortunate since Python is a wonderful language for many data-sciency tasks - Python makes things possible and pleasant, that would be a pain in other languages. * [1] https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm * [2] https://github.com/kevinconway/rpmvenv * [3] https://pex.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ * Another tool: https://github.com/spotify/dh-virtualenv
In Pip -t: A simple and transparent alternative to virtualenv in Python
chrissnell·Apr 22, 2015
I think you're wrong. I think most users are not installing trusted builds from their OS vendors. Piping curl to bash is incredibly common--many popular software packagers are doing it [1]. About a year and a half ago, I was playing around with Docker and made a build of memcached for my local environment and uploaded it to the registry [2] and then forgot all about it. Fast-forward to me writing this post and checking on it: 12 people have downloaded this! Who? I have no idea. It doesn't even have a proper description, but people tried it out and presumably ran it. It wasn't a malicious build but it certainly could have been. I'm sure that it would have hundreds of downloads if I had taken the time to make a legit-sounding description with b.s. promises of some special optimization or security hardening. The state of software p
Read the rest
ackaging in 2015 is truly dreadful. We spent most of the 2000's improving packaging technology to the point where we had safe, reliable tools that were easy for most folks to use. Here in the 2010's, software authors have rejected these toolsets in favor of bespoke, "kustom" installation tools and hacks. I just don't get it. Have people not heard of fpm [3]? [1] http://output.chrissnell.com/post/69023793377/stop-piping-cu... [2] https://registry.hub.docker.com/u/chrissnell/memcached/ [3] https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm
In The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers
e12e·Mar 17, 2015
See this stackoverflow q/a -- it appears to contain most of the current highlights. Basically Ubuntu has started packaging a few go apps, and fpm[f] seems to be an ok alternative in the meanwhile: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15104089/packaging-golang... packager.io (which upstream googs uses) seems to be a nice way to just get packages out there, but as far as I can tell it's pretty well walled-off behind a service, so no easy way to build locally, off-line, or without using packager.io etc. In that sense it strikes me as a poor choice for Free software, as there is no promise that things will continue to work, or can be made to work, long term. [f] https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm
In Gogs, an alternative to Gitlab

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