rpmExtract

This module lets you programmatically extract files from an rpm package.

Note: This module doesn't run rpm install, nor it lets you do so programmatically. This is a simple utility to extract files from an rpm package.

Why not use rpm2cpio?

rpm2cpio is CLI tool to extract RPM packages on *nix distributions. Its an excellent and powerful tool to work in shell, but creating a script that works cross platform, is not so trivial. Furthermore, there is no interaction with file system (other than initial reading of the rpm), which makes this implementation faster than spawning child processes and doing file I/O.

Install

$ npm install rpm-extract

Usage

const rpmExtract = require('rpm-extract')
 
rpmExtract('path/to/file.rpm')
    .then(function(files) {
      // do something array of files
    })
    .catch(function(err){
      // handle errors
    })

API

file object

The file object contains the metadata as well as contents of the file. It includes:

Property	Type	Description
data	Buffer	File's contents, in a NodeJS buffer instance.
mode	string	Unix file permissions or modes.
mtime	string	Last modification time
path	string	File path as was specified while creating the package.
type	string	Unix file type.
linkname	string	Symbolic Link name, if the file is a link.

error object

error object is an instance of standard Node JS Error

Currently, the module throws 2 known errors

• Not a valid rpm. - if the file is not an rpm package
• Only gzip compressed cpio archives are supported. - if the rpm was created from anything other than a .tar.gz archive.

Tests

$ npm install
$ npm test

Caveats

This module only supports rpm files created with GZip compression, since gzip is the most common format that works across different OS/platforms. If you have a need for other compression formats such xz, bzip2 etc. create an issue or better, send a Pull Request.

References

• how-do-i-extract-the-contents-of-an-rpm
• rpm2cpio

License

ISC

Released 2016 by Hrusikesh Panda @ Dow Jones