Simon Willison’s Weblog

Installing psycopg on Red Hat 9

31st December 2003

Adrian Holovaty and I spent some time today figuring out how to get the psycopg Postgres module to install on Red Hat 9. It took a while, but eventually we tweaked the spec file and used it to compile our own RPM. I’ve posted our modified spec file to the psycopg mailing list. More for my own record than anything else, the arcane incantations needed to create the RPM went roughly as follows:

1. Copy the modified psycopg.spec file in to /usr/src/redhat/SPECS/
2. Copy psycopg-1.1.11.tar.gz in to /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES
3. In the SPECS directory, run rpmbuild -ba psycopg.spec
4. Install the resulting RPM, which materialised in /usr/src/redhat/RPMS

The above was recreated by digging through my bash history—hopefully I haven’t missed a step. The technique appears to work for Fedora as well.