Building Signal Desktop on Fedora
In 2020-03-29 this guide was re-written from an old method and spec file to a new one fetched from here.
Here's how I build my own RPM for Signal Desktop. This guide has been evolving since Fedora 28.
Why?
The Signal org provides no official RPM and I don't trust 3rd parties building their own so I go through this process every time I need to update Signal Desktop.
Setup rpmbuild
Pick somwhere to build your RPMs, I've picked $HOME/src/rpmbuild and hard coded that into my .rpmmacros file. So it looks like this.
%_topdir %(echo $HOME)/src/rpmbuild
%_tmppath %(echo $HOME)/src/rpmbuild/tmp
%__arch_install_post \
[ "%{buildarch}" = "noarch" ] || QA_CHECK_RPATHS=1 ; \
case "${QA_CHECK_RPATHS:-}" in [1yY]*) /usr/lib/rpm/check-rpaths ;; esac \
/usr/lib/rpm/check-buildroot
Don't ask me what the last part does, I don't remember. But the first two lines are pretty self-explanatory and used by the rpmbuild command later.
$ mkdir -p $HOME/src/rpmbuild
$ mkdir $HOME/src/rpmbuild/{SPECS,SOURCES}
Download SPEC and SOURCE for Signal
Clone the git repo with the SPEC and patch files
$ mkdir $HOME/src
$ cd $HOME/src
$ git clone https://github.com/negativo17/Signal-Desktop
$ cp Signal-Desktop/*.spec ~/src/rpmbuild/SPECS/
$ cp Signal-Desktop/*.{patch,desktop} ~/src/rpmbuild/SOURCES/
$ cd ~/src/rpmbuild
NOTE That the last working commit I've successfully built Signal-Desktop with is this one.
Download the source release tarball into the SOURCES directory
$ curl -Lo SOURCES/Signal-Desktop-1.32.3.tar.gz https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/archive/v1.32.3.tar.gz
Install yarn
Some might install it using npm as a global package later but I prefer using official repos. So follow those instructions on installing the yarn repo.
Install dependency packages
$ sudo dnf install rpm-build nodejs
$ sudo dnf install gcc-c++ node-gyp yarn '@Development Tools'
Build
$ rpmbuild -bb SPECS/Signal-Desktop.spec
Install
$ sudo dnf install RPMS/x86_64/Signal-Desktop-1.32.3-1.fc31.x86_64.rpm