How to create your .deb packages

You've just created a beautiful application and now you want to deploy it.

You may want to create your .DEB

Create the following structure (adapt the path /opt/sample-app as your need)

sample-app
├── DEBIAN
│   ├── control
│   └── postinst
└── opt
    └── sample-app

mkdir sample-app/DEBIAN sample-app/opt/sample-app -p

The idea here is to recreate the structure of the target host that you want to create and/or copy files to.

Here we want to create the folder /opt/sample-app on the target server and copy our application inside it.

Next, copy your application into your sample-app/opt/sample-app folder

cp -r /home/user/sample-app sample-app/opt/sample-app/

Now, create a control file that gives some information about your application:

vi sample-app/DEBIAN/control

with the following content:

Package: sample-app
Version: 2
Maintainer: John Malkovich
Architecture: all
Description: This app does some wonderful things

Fairly often you will need to run a script to tune the installation, like changing the permission or owner of files, create a database, modify a config file, etc...

To do so create another file into the DEBIAN folder called postinst

vi sample-app/DEBIAN/postinst

Then, write your script inside it:

#!/usr/bin/bash

chown www-data:www-data /opt/sample-app -R

Finally, create your .DEB package using the dpkg-deb command:

dpkg-deg --build sample-app

This will create the file sample-app.deb

You can then install it using:

apt install ./sample-app.deb

And remove it using:

apt remove sample-app

That's it, you've now created your own .DEB package that you can distribute easily like a PRO.