How to set up a simple deb repository: Distilled Instructions


This is tutorial for setting the most simple working deb repository, tested on Linux Mint 10 (Ubuntu 10.10, in other words).
I used reprepro for this task -  an utility to create and manage Debian repositories. You can get it from standard repositories: 
sudo apt-get install reprepro
Now, to actual repo creation.
I was creating a repository at /var/www/repo/, you can create it anywhere, as long as Apache is able to reach it. 
mkdir /var/www/repo/
cd /var/www/repo/ # base directory for reprepro
mkdir conf/ # directory for reprepro configuration files
echo '
Origin: <project name>
Label: <project name>
Codename: <osrelease> # maverick, in my case
Architectures: i386 amd64
Components: main
Description: <description>
# if you need to distribute packages for more os versions (natty, for example)
# just add another block, separated by empty line
' > conf/distributions
reprepro -v export <osrelease>
It's done! Now you can add your packages by using 
reprepro -v includedeb <osrelease> /path/to/your/deb/file.deb
Note that all commands should be run from base directory of your repo, or with --basedir option supplied.

To use your newly created repositry, fire up Synaptic, go to Settings -> Repositories -> Other Software -> Add... and type following in: 
deb http://path.to.your.machine/repo <osrelease> main
In this tutorial, I skipped all the gory details and security concerns, so if you want more explanations and security advice, you can read more detailed how-to here.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to create your own simple 3D render engine in pure Java

Image
3D render engines that are nowdays used in games and multimedia production are breathtaking in complexity of mathematics and programming used. Results they produce are correspondingly stunning. Many developers may think that building even the simplest 3D application from scratch requires inhuman knowledge and effort, but thankfully that isn't always the case. Here I'd like to share with you how you can build your very own 3D render engine, fully capable of producing nice-looking 3D images. Why would you want to build a 3D engine? At the very least, it will really help understanding how real modern engines do their black magic. Also it is sometimes useful to add 3D rendering capabilities to your application without calling to huge external dependencies. In case of Java, that means that you can build 3D viewer app with zero dependencies (apart from Java...
Read more

Solving quadruple dependency injection problem in Angular

Angular comes with built-in dependency injection and module management system, but it can get a bit tedious to use when your project grows. Especially if you use RequireJS alongside it (a must for almost any project) and also want to be minification-safe with all those dependency injections. Let's look at a simple example with one module that provides a value and another module that prints that value: // answer.js define(["angular"], function(angular) { angular.module("the.answer") .value("TheAnswer", 42); }); // main.js define(["angular", "the.answer" ], function(angular) { angular.module("main", [ "the.answer" ]) .run([ "TheAnswer" , function( TheAnswer ) { console.log(TheAnswer); }]); }); As you can see, to provide a single dependency to my code, I had to specify it in four places (highlighted in red) - first as RequireJS dependency, then as Angular module dependency,...
Read more

Configuration objects in Scallop

It turned out that spreading type annotations throughout all the code in all places where options are requested is not a good idea. And, of course, it is prone to errors - who likes those type annotations? When using such option parsing libraries, users usually end up creating a big object with fields corresponding to each option: object Conf { var apples:Int = 0 var bananas:Int = 0 } // ... parsing options ... Conf.apples = parser.getOption("option name", ...) Conf.bananas = parser.getOption("other option name", ...) Sure, this works, and usually flexible enough - but why would anybody want to create such boilerplate? And by the way, nobody likes var's in their code :) So in Scallop , I needed to cut down that unnecessary repetition. There are several ways: Create a compiler plugin. The most powerful option. And the least enjoyable - even given the ease of installing a compiler plugin using sbt, I doubt that anybody will install compiler p...
Read more