debpacker 2.1.2

A tool to help pack projects as a DEB file

debpacker

debpacker is a Debian package creation tool. It builds deb files from source code based off a configuration file and build script.

Important features

• Easy integration into even enterprise-level build tools
• Super-simple JSON configuration file that can be easily generated

Requirements

• dpkg, but, c'mon, you should already have that
• python3
• pigz
• pytz (a pip package)
• tzlocal (a pip package)
• zmtools (a pip package)
• gh (the GitHub CLI)

Creating your first DEB file with debpacker

Creating a DEB package with this tool is as simple as creating a configuration file with where the files are to be installed, creating a build script, and running a command when read to pack.

Structure

When working on an application, a folder should be placed in the root of the source code called .debpack. The structure of this folder is as shown.

source_code_folder/
└── debpack/
    ├── config.json
    ├── build
    └── maintainer_scripts/
        ├──preinst
        ├──new-preinst
        ├──old-preinst
        ├──postinst
        ├──old-postinst
        ├──conflictor's-postinst
        ├──deconfigured's-postinst
        ├──prerm
        ├──old-prerm
        ├──new-prerm
        ├──postrm
        ├──old-postrm
        ├──disappearer's-postrm
        └──new-postrm

The config.json file

The config.json file is the file that determines what metadata the Debian package will be tagged with and where source/compiled files should be placed. Here is an example config.json file with an explanation of how debpacker will handle it.

{
    "section" : "utils",
    "priority" : "optional",
    "maintainer" : {
        "name" : "Zeke Marffy",
        "email" : "[e-mail]"
    },
    "depends" : [
        "python3",
    ],
    "description" : "hello world in Python",
    "build" : {
        "files" : {
            "helloworld.py" : "/usr/bin/helloworld-python"
        }
    },
    "architecture_all" : true
}

This file will specify to debpacker that this program is optional, the maintainer is Zeke Marffy, it requires Python 3 to run, and when installed, the helloworld.py script will be placed in /usr/bin/, remaned without .py at the end of it, for easy running. This JSON file also specifies that this package is usable on any architecture, due to the fact that Python is an interpreted langauge.

The build script

This is the script that is run in order to compile or otherwise build the source code files in a certain manner. You should use it to do something with the source code files and place them into the target folder. This is provided for convenience as the evironment variable SRC.

Why do I use this? Because I never learned make! Yay, reinventing the wheel!

In the case of a "hello world" script, as touched on in the config.json explanation, there is no build script to execute, as Python is an interpreted langauge. This is totally OK; a build script is optional. debpack can just copy files directly into a DEB if you would like with no compilation or otherwise build steps.

The maintainer-scripts

These are the apt control scripts that run under certain conditions. See here for more info.

Packing

Switch to the root directory of the source code and run debpack [app version]. It's as simple as that. Run debpack --help for more options.

Code changes that need to be made

• Add an attempt to write to the destination location before proceeding to create the entire package just to realize permission denied
• Automatically pack README files and assign them to another command?
• Automatic setup of a local/real APT repository to drop packages into
• bumpversion integration