Apache Cassandra rpmbuild Requirements: The build system needs to have Apache Cassandra ant artifacts build dependencies installed. Since Apache Cassandra depends on Python 2.7, the earliest version supported is RHEL/CentOS 7.0. Step 1: Build and copy sources to build tree: ant artifacts cp build/apache-cassandra-*-src.tar.gz $RPM_BUILD_DIR/SOURCES/ Step 2: Since there is no version specified in the SPEC file, one needs to be passed at rpmbuild time (example with 4.0): rpmbuild --define="version 4.0" -ba redhat/cassandra.spec RPM files can be found in their respective build tree directories: ls -l $RPM_BUILD_DIR/{SRPMS,RPMS}/ Hint: Don't build packages as root.. # this makes your RPM_BUILD_DIR = ~/rpmbuild mkdir -p ~/rpmbuild/{BUILD,RPMS,SOURCES,SPECS,SRPMS} echo '%_topdir %(echo $HOME)/rpmbuild' > ~/.rpmmacros