Build your own Debian Packages

Until now when I wrote some scripts I always copied them directly to the Servers .I always thought: “It would be really cool if this were a Debian Package”. I played with the thougth of creating my own packages but it seemed to be very complicated (reading the Debian Standard Howto). Lately I discovered, that the Debian Howto covers a lot more than I actually needed and to create a simple binary package you actually need almost only your scripts. So let’s start.

Package-Folder-Structure

Every Debian Package has to contain at least a directory named “DEBIAN” and this has to contain the files “control”, “postinst” and “prerm”.
“postinst” and “prerm” are scripts which are executed “post installation” or “pre removal”. So you can figure out what they’re for ;). The control-file contains information about the package e.g. the name, version, etc.

Folder-Structure

mypackage/
|-- DEBIAN
|   |-- control
|   |-- postinst
|   `-- prerm

Basic control file

A basic control-file could look like this:

Package: mydebianpackage
Version: 0.1
Priority: optional
Architecture: all
Essential: no
Depends: perl
Maintainer: Jonas Garcia Koehel
Provides: mydebianpackage
Description: Some scripts used to do something

detailed description of the fields: http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-controlfields.html

Basic postinst and prerm scripts

They do nothing but have to exist to build the package

#!/bin/sh
exit 0

Create the folder structure including own scripts

Lets say you want your scripts “script1.pl”, “script2.pl”, and “script3.pl” in the folder /usr/bin and you want “myscripts.conf” in /etc, so you create the following structure inside a build-directory (which can be named freely).

mydebianpackage/
|-- DEBIAN
|   |-- control
|   |-- postinst
|   `-- prerm
|-- etc
|   |-- myscripts.conf
|
`-- usr
    |-- bin
         |-- script1.pl
         |-- script2.pl
         `-- script3.pl

That’s all

Speaking the magic spell

And Abrakadabra:

dpkg -b ./mydebianpackage/ mydebianpackage_0.1.deb

Ready is your own debian package

Install it on a system

To install it just copy it to a server and type:

dpkg -i mydebianpackage_0.1.deb

to remove it again

apt-get remove mydebianpackage