How to Abort the Installation of an Rpm Package If Some Conditions Are Not Met in Specfile

How to abort the installation of an rpm package if some conditions are not met in specfile?

You can use the %pre section for this kind of task.

The %pre script executes just before the package is to be installed.
It is the rare package that requires anything to be done prior to
installation; none of the 350 packages that comprise Red Hat Linux
Linux 4.0 make use of it.

Some guide to get you started; the script content (not used in a %pre section) comes from jpackage-utils, you will find some other good examples of scripts there:

  %pre
  # try to find jvm from java command

  # try javac first, or we might get the location of the jre instead - djw
  java=`which javac 2>/dev/null || :`

  # if we don't have the jdk, then maybe we have the jre - djw
  if [ -z "$java" ] ; then
    java=`which java 2>/dev/null || :`
  fi

  if [ -n "$java" ] ; then
    while [ -h "$java" ] ; do
      java=`readlink $java 2>/dev/null`
    done
    return
  fi

  echo "Can't find java virtual machine, aborting."
  exit 1

How to require a file not owned by an RPM in a spec file Requires line?

According to the Fedora Packaging Guidelines:

... rpm file dependencies don't work according to what's on the filesystem, they work according to the path specified in the rpm %files section.

So, you can't use Requires: to require a file that is not owned by an RPM.

A possible alternative is to check for existence of the file in the %pre section and exit with non-zero status if it is not present. See Paul Rubel's reply to Failing an RPM install programatically in a spec step or ᴳᵁᴵᴰᴼ's reply to How to abort the installation of an rpm package if some conditions are not met in specfile? for examples of how to use the technique.

Note that a non-zero exit status from the %pre section will cause the RPM to fail to install, but the RPM transaction still appears to succeed, which can cause confusion. See How to exit rpm install in case of an error.

Failing an RPM install programmatically in a spec step

It turns out that if you exit in the %pre stage the rpm install will fail.

%pre
if [ -f /some/file ]
then
    echo "/some/file exists, it shouldn't"
    exit 1
fi

Reference: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:ScriptletSnippets

install RPM from an rpm

If I understand your question correctly you should be using the Requires tag.

The flow from updating sources to making a rpm package

My main suggestion, I think, would be to work on having the application able to run out of a development directory so you don't have to install it locally just to try it. Alternatively have a "make install" target so you can just install it (outside rpm) for testing.

But answering your question more specifically, here are two ideas:

A script that exports a .tar.gz from your source control might help (git help archive) on step 2-3.

If you have the .spec file inside the .tar.gz you can use rpmbuild -ta some.tar.gz to build the rpms from the tar.gz file.

rpmBUILD : rpmbuild display client side message or log

Per rpm.org you can use the %preun script to run any normal shell commands prior to the uninstall occurring, so you could stop the service, or abort with an error.

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