This mini-HOWTO shows how to build a minimal Debian .deb package.
Chr. Clemens Lee clemens@kclee.de
- formatted into markdown
- fixed a few typos
- added some more headings to the TOC
- updated email address and added link to Turkish translation by Oguz Yarimtepe
- fixed two typos reported by Claudio Cattazzo
- applying Frank Lichtenheld's feedback
- first version
- Introduction
- Resources on the Web
- Getting Started
- Package Structure
- debian-binary
- data.tar.gz
- control.tar.gz
- Hands On
- control
- dpkg-deb
- Double Check
- lintian
- Minimal Documentation
- fakeroot
- More Documentation
- Summary
- Prerequisite files
- Setup temporary
debiandirectories - Copy files into temporary
debiantree - Build and check binary Debian package
- What Else
- Credits
- Links
The intended use of such a newly created archive is to install it only on your own box, not to get them into the official Debian distribution. To follow the 'official' process, please study the Debian New Maintainers' Guide.
Normal Debian packages get a proper source package, including a debian/ rules file which automates the steps involved in creating the binary package. Here we just show how to package a simple shell script or binary executable into a small binary package.
BTW, I assume you know how to use tar, man, and what a .tar.gz file
and Debian is (and how to use an editor ;-), but I
assume you have never touched programs like ar or dpkg.
The Debian Reference gives an excellent overview as well as detailed information for everything Debian specific.
The official document for creating your own Debian packages is the Debian New Maintainers' Guide.
From the Debian Reference 2.2.2 2002-11-30:
The internals of this Debian binary package format are described in the deb(5) manual page. Because this internal format is subject to change (between major releases of Debian), always use dpkg-deb(8) for manipulating .deb files.
From the dpkg-deb man page:
dpkg-deb packs, unpacks and provides information about Debian archives. .deb files can also be manipulated with ar and tar alone if necessary. Use dpkg to install and remove packages from your system.
You might find lots of example .deb files in directory /var/cache/apt/archives/. With dpkg-deb -I somepackage.deb you might get a general overview of what this package offers in particular. dpkg-deb -c somepackage.deb lists all files which will be installed.
List content of the .deb file with ar tv somepackage.deb. Use the x option to extract the files.
Let's examine one example package a little bit closer. E.g. file parted_1.4.24-4_i386.deb contains these three files:
$ ar tv parted_1.4.24-4_i386.deb
rw-r--r-- 0/0 4 Mar 28 13:46 2002 debian-binary
rw-r--r-- 0/0 1386 Mar 28 13:46 2002 control.tar.gz
rw-r--r-- 0/0 39772 Mar 28 13:46 2002 data.tar.gz
Now we can start to extract all files including the content of the tar files.
The content of this file is 2.0\n. This states the version of the deb file format. For 2.0 all other lines get ignored.
The data.tar.gz file contains all the files that will be installed with their destination paths:
drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2002-03-28 13:44:57 ./
drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2002-03-28 13:44:49 ./sbin/
-rwxr-xr-x root/root 31656 2002-03-28 13:44:49 ./sbin/parted
drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2002-03-28 13:44:38 ./usr/
drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2002-03-28 13:44:41 ./usr/share/
drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2002-03-28 13:44:38 ./usr/share/man/
drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2002-03-28 13:44:52 ./usr/share/man/man8/
-rw-r--r-- root/root 1608 2002-03-28 13:44:37 ./usr/share/man/man8/parted.8.gz
drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2002-03-28 13:44:41 ./usr/share/doc/
drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2002-03-28 13:44:52 ./usr/share/doc/parted/
-rw-r--r-- root/root 1880 2002-03-07 14:20:08 ./usr/share/doc/parted/README.Debian
-rw-r--r-- root/root 1347 2002-02-27 01:40:50 ./usr/share/doc/parted/copyright
-rw-r--r-- root/root 6444 2002-03-28 13:37:33 ./usr/share/doc/parted/changelog.Debian.gz
-rw-r--r-- root/root 15523 2002-03-28 02:36:43 ./usr/share/doc/parted/changelog.gz
It must be the last file in the deb archive.
In our example this file has the following content:
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1336 Mar 28 2002 control
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 388 Mar 28 2002 md5sums
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 253 Mar 28 2002 postinst
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 194 Mar 28 2002 prerm
md5sums contains for each file in data.tar.gz the md5sum. In our example the content looks like this:
1d15dcfb6bb23751f76a2b7b844d3c57 sbin/parted
4eb9cc2e192f1b997cf13ff0b921af74 usr/share/man/man8/parted.8.gz
2f356768104a09092e26a6abb012c95e usr/share/doc/parted/README.Debian
a6259bd193f8f150c171c88df2158e3e usr/share/doc/parted/copyright
7f8078127a689d647586420184fc3953 usr/share/doc/parted/changelog.Debian.gz
98f217a3bf8a7407d66fd6ac8c5589b7 usr/share/doc/parted/changelog.gz
Don't worry, the md5sums file as well as the postinst and prerm files
are not mandatory for your first package. But please take a note of their
existence, every proper official Debian package has them for good reasons.
prerm and postinst seem to take care of removing old documentation files and adding a link from doc to share/doc.
$ cat postinst
#!/bin/sh
set -e
# Automatically added by dh_installdocs
if [ "$1" = "configure" ]; then
if [ -d /usr/doc -a ! -e /usr/doc/parted -a -d /usr/share/doc/parted ]; then
ln -sf ../share/doc/parted /usr/doc/parted
fi
fi
# End automatically added section
$ cat prerm
#!/bin/sh
set -e
# Automatically added by dh_installdocs
if [ \( "$1" = "upgrade" -o "$1" = "remove" \) -a -L /usr/doc/parted ]; then
rm -f /usr/doc/parted
fi
# End automatically added section
And finally the most interesting file:
$ cat control
Package: parted
Version: 1.4.24-4
Section: admin
Priority: optional
Architecture: i386
Depends: e2fsprogs (>= 1.27-2), libc6 (>= 2.2.4-4), libncurses5 (>= \
5.2.20020112a-1), libparted1.4 (>= 1.4.13+14pre1), libreadline4 (>= \
4.2a-4), libuuid1
Suggests: parted-doc
Conflicts: fsresize
Replaces: fsresize
Installed-Size: 76
Maintainer: Timshel Knoll <timshel@debian.org>
Description: The GNU Parted disk partition resizing program
GNU Parted is a program that allows you to create, destroy,
resize, move and copy hard disk partitions. This is useful
for creating space for new operating systems, reorganizing
disk usage, and copying data to new hard disks.
.
This package contains the Parted binary and manual page.
.
Parted currently supports DOS, Mac, Sun, BSD, GPT and PC98
disklabels/partition tables, as well as a 'loop' (raw disk)
type which allows use on RAID/LVM. Filesystems supported are
ext2, ext3, FAT (FAT16 and FAT32) and linux-swap. Parted can
also detect HFS (Mac OS), JFS, NTFS, ReiserFS, UFS and XFS
filesystems, but cannot create/remove/resize/check these
filesystems yet.
.
The nature of this software means that any bugs could cause
massive data loss. While there are no known bugs at the moment,
they could exist, so please back up all important files before
running it, and do so at your own risk.
Further information about the control file can be obtained via man 5 deb-control.
Now it is time to get practical ourselves. I have a simple shell script
named linuxstatus which I want to install as /usr/bin/linuxstatus. So
first let's create a directory named debian next to the file linuxstatus.
$ mkdir -p ./debian/usr/bin
$ cp linuxstatus ./debian/usr/bin
Let's start with the control file. The version number must have a dash with
an additional Debian package version number, e.g. 1.1-1. If your program
consists e.g. only of portable shell scripts, use all as its
Architecture.
For Depends you might need to find out to which package a certain file or
program your new package relies onto belongs to. You can use dpkg -S <file> for this to find this out, e.g.:
$ dkpg -S /bin/cat
coreutils: /bin/cat
Then to find out more about package coreutils you can use the command
apt-cache showpkg coreutils, which will tell you among other things the
current version number that is installed on the system.
As a side note, there are two more ways to find the same information. There is a web page where you can search for Debian files: [http://www.debian.org/distrib/packages](http://www.debian.org/ distrib/packages). Go to the bottom of that page to fill out the web form.
Last not least there is a nice GUI application named kpackage, which
provides convenient package browsing options and also allows to search after
packages given individual file names.
Suggests, Conflicts, and Replaces etc. can be left out if not needed.
So here is the result of our first control file:
Package: linuxstatus
Version: 1.1-1
Section: base
Priority: optional
Architecture: all
Depends: bash (>= 2.05a-11), textutils (>= 2.0-12), awk, procps (>= \
1:2.0.7-8), sed (>= 3.02-8), grep (>= 2.4.2-3), coreutils (>= 5.0-5)
Maintainer: Chr. Clemens Lee <clemens@kclee.de>
Description: Linux system information
This script provides a broad overview of different
system aspects.
The control file gets copied into a directory called DEBIAN inside the other debian directory.
$ mkdir -p debian/DEBIAN
$ find ./debian -type d | xargs chmod 755 # this is necessary on Debian Woody, don't ask me why
$ cp control debian/DEBIAN
If you expect your package to have a bigger audience in the future it might help to read this: Writing Debian package descriptions article.
Now it is almost done. Just type:
$ dpkg-deb --build debian
dpkg-deb: building package `linuxstatus' in `debian.deb'.
$ mv debian.deb linuxstatus_1.1-1_all.deb
Uh, that was all easier than expected. Now we just have to install this package on our box and we are done:
root# dpkg -i ./linuxstatus_1.1-1_all.deb
Type linuxstatus or ls -l /usr/bin/linuxstatus to see if it worked. If
you don't like your package any more, just type dpkg -r linuxstatus and
check again that the package is deinstalled. If you install a newer version
you don't have to remove the old one first, thought.
If you are curious about the version numbering scheme and naming conventions for a Debian package, have a read at [this section](http://www.debian.org/doc/ manuals/reference/ch-system.en.html#s-pkgname) in The Debian Reference.
Now that you have gotten a first impression and build your own binary package, it is time to get a little bit more serious and have a look at the quality of the package that we have produced.
Luckily for us the Debian project provides a lint like tool for checking
Debian packages. This tool is named lintian. If you have not installed it
yet on your system, this is a good moment (apt-get install lintian).
Now we use this little treasure tool on our new package file:
$ lintian linuxstatus_1.1-1_all.deb
E: linuxstatus: binary-without-manpage linuxstatus
E: linuxstatus: no-copyright-file
W: linuxstatus: prerm-does-not-remove-usr-doc-link
W: linuxstatus: postinst-does-not-set-usr-doc-link
Uh, doesn't look so perfect. We miss a man page, copyright file, and also those prerm and postinst scripts.
This is not the place to say much about writing and creating man pages,
there are many books that have one or another chapter related to this topic
and there is also The Linux MAN-PAGE-HOWTO online.
So lets do a little time warp and assume you have now a perfect man page for your script at location ./man/man1/linuxstatus.1.
The same for a copyright file. You can find enough examples under the /usr/share/doc directory with this command: find /usr/share/doc -name "copyright"
So here is our own example of a 'copyright' file:
linuxstatus
Copyright: Chr. Clemens Lee <clemens@kclee.de>
2002-12-07
The home page of linuxstatus is at:
http://www.kclee.de/clemens/unix/index.html#linuxstatus
The entire code base may be distributed under the terms of the GNU General
Public License (GPL), which appears immediately below. Alternatively, all
of the source code as any code derived from that code may instead be
distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), at the
choice of the distributor. The complete text of the LGPL appears at the
bottom of this file.
See /usr/share/common-licenses/(GPL|LGPL)
For the prerm and postinst scripts we copy one to one the postinst
examples from the parted package above into files with the same name in our
own project directory. These files should work for us just as well.
Now we create the debian package again. In the control file we first
increase the version number from 1.1-1 to 1.2-1 (since we have written a new
man page we increase our internal release number). We also need to copy the
new files to their appropriate places:
$ mkdir -p ./debian/usr/share/man/man1
$ mkdir -p ./debian/usr/share/doc/linuxstatus
$ find ./debian -type d | xargs chmod 755
$ cp ./man/man1/linuxstatus.1 ./debian/usr/share/man/man1
$ cp ./copyright ./debian/usr/share/doc/linuxstatus
$ cp ./prerm ./postinst ./debian/DEBIAN
$ gzip --best ./debian/usr/share/man/man1/linuxstatus.1
$
$ dpkg-deb --build debian
dpkg-deb: building package `linuxstatus' in `debian.deb'.
$ mv debian.deb linuxstatus_1.2-1_all.deb
Gzip is necessary because lintian expects man page files to be compressed as small as possible.
Now lets see if our package has become a better Debian citizen:
$ lintian linuxstatus_1.2-1_all.deb
E: linuxstatus: control-file-has-bad-owner prerm clemens/clemens != root/root
E: linuxstatus: control-file-has-bad-owner postinst clemens/clemens != root/root
E: linuxstatus: bad-owner-for-doc-file usr/share/doc/linuxstatus/ clemens/clemens != root/root
E: linuxstatus: bad-owner-for-doc-file usr/share/doc/linuxstatus/copyright clemens/clemens != root/root
E: linuxstatus: debian-changelog-file-missing
Ups, new complains. OK, we will not give up. Actually most errors seem to
be the same problem. Our files are all packaged for user and group clemens,
while I assume most people would prefer having them installed as root/root.
But this is easily fixed using the tool fakeroot. So lets fix and check
this quickly (while ignoring the changelog issue):
$ fakeroot dpkg-deb --build debian
dpkg-deb: building package `linuxstatus' in `debian.deb'.
$ mv debian.deb linuxstatus_1.2-1_all.deb
$ lintian linuxstatus_1.2-1_all.deb
E: linuxstatus: debian-changelog-file-missing
Fine, but we have yet another file to add to the package.
Let me tell you already that next to a changelog file in the doc/linuxstatus directory a changelog.Debian file is also required. Both should be gzipped as well.
Here are two example files, changelog:
linuxstatus (1.2-1)
* Made Debian package lintian clean.
-- Chr. Clemens Lee <clemens@kclee.de> 2002-12-13
and changelog.Debian:
linuxstatus Debian maintainer and upstream author are identical.
Therefore see also normal changelog file for Debian changes.
The Debian Policy file has more details regarding the format of the changelog file.
Now hopefully our last step will be:
$ cp ./changelog ./changelog.Debian ./debian/usr/share/doc/linuxstatus
$ gzip --best ./debian/usr/share/doc/linuxstatus/changelog
$ gzip --best ./debian/usr/share/doc/linuxstatus/changelog.Debian
$ fakeroot dpkg-deb --build ./debian
dpkg-deb: building package `linuxstatus' in `debian.deb'.
$ mv debian.deb linuxstatus_1.2-1_all.deb
$ lintian linuxstatus_1.2-1_all.deb
Ah, we get no more complains :-). As root you can install now this package
over the old one, again with the standard dpkg -i command:
root# dpkg -i ./linuxstatus_1.2-1_all.deb
(Reading database ... 97124 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to replace linuxstatus 1.1-1 (using linuxstatus_1.2-1_all.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement linuxstatus ...
Setting up linuxstatus (1.2-1) ...
Not to get confused, let us recapture all steps we have taken to build our binary Debian package.
- one or more binary executable or shell script files
- a man page for each executable file
- a
controlfile - a
copyrightfile - a
changelogandchangelog.Debianfile
- create
debian/usr/bindirectory (or wherever you plan to place your executable files) - create
debian/usr/share/man/man1(or whatever section your man page belongs into) - create
debian/DEBIANdirectory - create
debian/usr/share/doc/<package_name> - make sure all sub directories of 'debian' have file permission 0755
- copy executable file into
debian/usr/bindirectory (or wherever you plan to place your executable files) - copy man page file into
debian/usr/share/man/man1directory - copy
controlfile intodebian/DEBIANdirectory - copy
copyright,changelog, andchangelog.Debianfiles intodebian/ usr/share/doc/<package_name> - gzip man page,
copyright,changelog, andchangelog.Debianfiles with option--bestinside the temporarydebiantree
- invoke
dpkg-deb --buildusingfakerooton thedebiandirectory - rename resulting
debian.debfile to its final package name including version and architecture information - check resulting
.debpackage file for Debian policy compliance usinglintian
There are many details which have not been covered here, like how to distribute Unix daemons, configuration files and much more.
But most important, I want to emphasize again that for Debian maintainers,
packages are source packages, not binary packages. They never interact
directly with the internals binary packages. In fact only dpkg-deb and
dpkg developers need to know what they are. In fact it is not recommended
to do so.
If a developer were to explain someone how to build a Debian package, he will certainly explain how to make a source package and how to build it.
On the other hand, not every developer wants to submit his software to
Debian (yet), but still wants to profit from the advantages a packaging
system like dpkg offers without releasing package source code. Personally I
will release my freeware projects still as tar.gz files with source code etc.
for all kind of platforms, while I plan to offer more and more .deb
packages for the convenience of Debian users who just want to install and use
my software.
If someone wants to do the next step to submit a software package to Debian, you have to move on to study the Debian New Maintainers' Guide as well as the Debian Policy Manual first. On your undertaking to create a Debian source package, also have a look at the debian-mentors mailing list to see experienced and beginning Debian developers interacting with each other and tackling similar problem you might encounter.
Thanks to
- Colin Watson for contributing a sentence in the abstract and giving feedback regarding structure, focus and title of this HowTo,
- Bill Allombert for contributing a sentence in the 'What Else' section and giving feedback reinforcing what Colin had said as well,
- Santiago Vila for pointing out that 'md' is a local alias and the (Unix) world has standardized on
mkdir, - Tabatha Marshall from the TLDP project for general support,
- Joey Hess, Carlo Perassi, and Joe Riel for minor corrections,
- Claudio Cattazzo for conversion of my private xml document to standard docbook format together which resulted also in a number of minor corrections and improvements (2003-10-04),
- Frank Lichtenheld for finding errors introduced when the HTML pages get generated and for suggesting to use
dpkg -S <file>when looking for a package containing a certain file (2003-12-13), - Hugh Hartmann for translating [this HOWTO to Italian](http://it.tldp.org/HOWTO/ Debian-Binary-Package-Building-HOWTO/index.html) and Claudio Cattazzo for revising the translation (2003-12-13), and
- Oguz Yarimtepe for translating this HOWTO to Turkish (2005-08-09).