Some people use programs like apt-ftparchive however in this example I’ll cover an alternative to apt-ftparchive by using a small bash script.įirst let’s look at an example of a Release file, which can be broken up into two parts: Unfortunately dpkg-scanpackages does not create Release files.

The contents of the Packages file is a list of all available packages along with metadata from the DEBIAN/control file, and some hashes which can be used to validate the integrity of the package. If you had multiple deb files, you would have an entry for each package Let’s take a quick look at the contents of the Packages file: Package: hello-worldįilename: pool/main/hello-world_0.0.1-1_b apt-get -o Acquire::CompressionTypes::Order::=bz2 update). The apt.conf man page has details on configuring apt to prefer one format over the other via the CompressionTypes option it is also possible to temporarily override it on the command-line (e.g. In order to support other compression types, one must adjust the previous command for each desired compressed file format. Apt repositories can support more than just gzip compression, e.g. Note: A reader has reported supplying a compressed file might be a required step rather than optional either way it’s best to create a compressed file.

architecture is the target architecture of the platform, amd64 in this example however if your package is architecture-independent (e.g. a python script), then you can set this to all.

release-number is used to track different releases of the same software version it’s usually set to 1, but hypothetically if there was an error in the packaging (e.g. a file was missed, or the description had an error in it, or a post-install script was wrong), this number would be increased to track the change, and.

version is the version of the software, 0.0.1 in our case,.

package-name is the name of our package, hello-world in our case,.

To start we will create a directory in the form: _-_ deb packages to package and distribute programs. Step 1: Creating a deb Packageĭebian, and Debian-based Linux distributions use. It’s the binary we will be distributing in our deb package. There’s no technical reason for picking C for this example – the language doesn’t matter. Cd ~/example/hello-world-program gcc -o hello-world hello.c

Install deb package