Debmagic

Modern, robust & easy tooling for building and packaging Debian/Ubuntu packages — while staying backwards compatible.

• Build any package in an isolated container environment with debmagic build
• Run Debian autopkgtest tests against built packages with debmagic test
• Lint with debmagic check
• Debug build environments interactively with debmagic shell

Installation

cargo install debmagic

pip install debmagic

or run it directly with uv:

uvx debmagic

Quickstart

Build any Debian-packaged source tree in an isolated environment:

cd your-package
debmagic build binary --driver lxd \
  --output-dir /tmp/build-artifacts

Pick a driver explicitly — there's no auto-detection:

Create a source package (.dsc) without compilation:

debmagic build source

Run the package's declared Debian autopkgtest tests against a prior build:

debmagic build binary --driver docker
debmagic test --driver docker

Use --strict to fail on skipped or undeclared tests (exit code 2). The bare driver requires --allow-host-test.

Useful options

• --distro <codename> — select the target distro/release (e.g. trixie, noble) if the changelog is ambiguous
• --persistent — retain the build environment for repeated attempts
• --incremental — sync only changed sources for faster rebuilds; implies --persistent
• --sign — GPG-sign the resulting .changes/.dsc/.buildinfo
• --apt-mirror <url> — use a faster mirror for build-dependency resolution

Any of these can be persisted in a debmagic.toml config file instead of repeating CLI flags.

Inspecting a failed build

Failed builds tear down their environment by default. Pass --shell-on-failure to drop into a shell when stdout is a TTY, or build with --persistent and attach afterwards:

debmagic shell

Documentation

For the full documentation — the build quick reference, packaging guides, configuration and module references — visit debmagic.readthedocs.io.

License

Released under the GNU General Public License version 2 or later.