I recently wanted to put some shared libraries and executables in .deb files, so end-users could just apt install ./the-package.deb. This task is straightforward but it’s surprisingly hard to find instructions. I found Vincent Bernat’s Pragmatic Debian packaging quite useful, and I recommend you go read that first. However, his methods are still too reasonable and maintainable for me. I just want to put my binary in a .deb, dammit.
Assume we work at a company called CoolSoft. CoolSoft has a program called sayhi that says hi. It can be a binary, shell script, whatever.
$ ./sayhi
hi
We would like to install it into /usr/local/bin. First create a script called make_sayhi_deb.sh:
#!/bin/bash
set -euo pipefail
pkgname=sayhi
version=0.0.1
arch=all
tmpdir=$(mktemp -d)
pkgdir=$tmpdir/pkg
mkdir -p $pkgdir $pkgdir/DEBIAN
# this is the part where it installs your files
install -Dm 755 sayhi $pkgdir/usr/local/bin/sayhi
cat <<EOF >$pkgdir/DEBIAN/control
Package: $pkgname
Version: $version
Architecture: $arch
Maintainer: CoolSoft (admin@coolsoft.com)
Description: It says hi
Depends:
EOF
dpkg -b $pkgdir ./${pkgname}_${version}_${arch}.deb
rm -rf $tmpdir
Then just run it and install the package.
$ bash make_sayhi_deb.sh
dpkg-deb: building package 'sayhi' in './sayhi_0.0.1_all.deb'.
$ sudo apt install ./sayhi_0.0.1_all.deb
...
$ sayhi
hi
Architectures: My sayhi is actually a shell script, so I chose arch=all above. If yours is a binary, set it to amd64, arm64, or another Debian architecture.
More files: See above where it says # this is the part where it installs your files? Well, just keep installing your other files. 755 for executables, 644 otherwise. -D creates leading folders automatically.
# this is the part where it installs your files
install -Dm 755 sayhi $pkgdir/usr/local/bin/sayhi
install -Dm 644 libsayhi.so $pkgdir/usr/local/lib/libsayhi.so