.RPM

Introduction

An .rpm file is a software package for Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, openSUSE and the other Linux distributions that use the RPM Package Manager, first made by Red Hat. It holds the files to install, the package’s name, version and the other packages it needs, and scripts to run when it is installed or removed. The rpm tool installs a single file; DNF and zypper fetch packages and their dependencies from repositories.

Source packages, which hold the source code and the spec file used to build the binary packages, end in .src.rpm.

Structure

An RPM file has four parts. The lead is a fixed 96-byte block from the format’s early days, starting with the magic bytes ED AB EE DB; tools now mostly ignore it. Then come two headers in the same structure, each starting with 8E AD E8 01: the signature header, holding checksums and signatures of the rest of the file, and the main header, a table of tagged entries giving the name, version, dependencies, scripts and file list. The payload follows: a cpio archive of the files, compressed with gzip, xz or zstd.

Links