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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.

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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, 6:36:16 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

5 sources
mherrmann·Dec 7, 2017
I'm an indie dev and have been developing a cross-platform (Py)Qt app for the past 1.5 years (~2100 dev hrs) [0]. Given that Qt is cross-platform desktop development, it's very solid. But there are a lot of things one has to do that are not required for (say) web apps: * Creating standalone executables / installers for the app itself is already not so easy (I use - and recommend - PyInstaller [1]). * Code signing the executables so users don't get an ugly "this app is untrusted" warning is tedious for the three different platforms * Auto-updating is a pain to implement as well. I'm using Google Omaha (same as Chrome) on Windows [2], Sparkle on Mac [3] and Debian packages / fpm on Linux [4]. In total, I probably spent two to three months just on auto-update functionality. * You really can tell that Qt is "drawing pixels on screen". Sometim
Read the rest
es you have to draw pixels / perform pixel calculations yourself. The built-in "CSS" engine QSS works to some extent, but often has unpredictable results and weird edge cases. I considered Electron as well. But its startup performance is just prohibitive. I blogged about this (and which other technologies I considered) [5]. I've been wondering for a while whether I should not open source my solutions to all of the above problems, to save other people the months required getting everything to work. Would anybody be interested in that? It would be something like a PyQt alternative for Electron. [edit] People are very interested so I'm starting a MailChimp list. If you want to know if/when I open source a solution then please subscribe at http://eepurl.com/ddgpnf. [0]: https://fman.io [1]: http://www.pyinstaller.org [2]: https://fman.io/blog/google-omaha-tutorial/ [3]: https://sparkle-project.org/ [4]: https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm [5]: https://fman.io/blog/picking-technologies-for-a-desktop-app-...
In Qt 5.10 released
_joel·Nov 10, 2017
No, generally there is a debian directory with things like rules, control file, copyright etc. A .deb is basically a tarball with some manifest information. You can build 'non-standard' packages in this way (also see FPM[1] - which will do this and more rpm etc). However if you ever want to upstream a package, there are guidelines that debian produce around this. [1] https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm
In Electric Sheep on Ubuntu Linux 17.10
cure·Jun 18, 2017
There are a lot of ways to handle golang for Debian. Here's a quick command to build a golang-1.8.3 package with fpm (download and extract go1.8.3.linux-amd64.tar.gz first; get fpm from https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm): #!/bin/bash DEBIAN_REVISION=1 fpm -s dir -t deb -n golang-go -v 1.8.3-$DEBIAN_REVISION go1.8.3.linux-amd64/bin/go=/usr/local/bin/go go1.8.3.linux-amd64/bin/gofmt=/usr/local/bin/gofmt go1.8.3.linux-amd64/bin/godoc=/usr/local/bin/godoc go1.8.3.linux-amd64/=/usr/local/go
In Debian 9 Stretch released

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