Rangsiman Ketkaew

Building Package on Debian/Ubuntu Server

Posted by Rangsiman Ketkaew on May 16, 2021

Table of Content

Table of Content
Getting Start
Generate KEY id.
Send KEY ID to Ubuntu server
Generate SSH key
Setting pbuilder up
Configure your LaunchPad account
Confirmation for LaunchPad
Upload SSH key to LaunchPad
Configure the shell
Prepare your program
Build .deb file
Tips

Debian/Ubuntu is one of the most popular Linux distributions. Installing new package or program on Ubuntu is very easy. With apt or apt-get commands, the user can manage their installed package, install new packages, upgrade new versions, removed old packages, etc. However, there are a number of things you need to do to get started building package and developing for Ubuntu community. So I suggest you read this post carefully!

This post will explain how can we build our own Debian/Ubuntu package file and upload it to the server. This means that you can distribute your program to everybody via sudo apt-get install YOUR_PROGRAM command!

Getting Start

Original document is available at http://packaging.ubuntu.com/singlehtml/index.html. Although it is very good reference, but the instruction explained in that document may be too complicated for the end-users. I boil it down and explain it in a way you can follow easily.

Generate KEY id.

Generate KEY id.

gpg --full-gen-key

Follows an interactive question.

Question 1:

Please select what kind of key you want:
(1) RSA and RSA (default)
(2) DSA and Elgamal
(3) DSA (sign only)
(4) RSA (sign only)
Your selection? 1

Question 2:

Please specify how long the key should be valid.
      0 = key does not expire
    n = key expires in n days
    n w = key expires in n weeks
    n m = key expires in n months
    n y = key expires in n years
Key is valid for 0 0

Question 3:

Real name: Rangsiman Ketkaew
Email address: test_test@gmail.com
Comment:

Check your KEY id

gpg --list-secret-keys --keyid-format LONG

Output:

sec   rsa3072/TESTKEY112233 2019-05-23 [SC] [expires: XXXX-XX-XX]
      4C220144Fd0892C02CF337AC6F0BF90G43CDE61D
uid       [ultimate] Rangsiman Ketkaew <test_test@gmail.com>
ssb   rsa3072/XXXXXXXXX 2019-05-23 [E] [expires: XXXX-XX-XX]

Send KEY ID to Ubuntu server

gpg --send-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com TESTKEY112233

Generate SSH key

To generate SSH key, use following command:

ssh-keygen -t rsa

Then you will ask where the ssh key fille will be saved, just enter the default setting.

Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/home/nutt/.ssh/id_rsa):

Type and confirm your passphrase.

Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:

Done!

Your identification has been saved in /home/rangsiman/.ssh/id_rsa.
Your public key has been saved in /home/rangsiman/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.
The key fingerprint is:
SHA256:sdfsfsdfsfdsfsdfsfdsfsdfsfsfdsfdsdfsdfsdf rangsiman@Ubuntu
The key's randomart image is:
+---[RSA 2048]----+
|==_.. |
|++ B |
| .O B . |
| _ X = B E |
|+ X B B S . |
| \* = X . . . |
| + = . . |
| + |
| |
+----[SHA256]-----+

Setting pbuilder up

Execute following command

pbuilder-dist create where is for example xenial, zesty, artful or in the case of Debian maybe sid or buster.

FYI: You can use following command to check Ubuntu code name:

lsb_release -a

Output:

No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS
Release: 18.04
Codename: bionic

Configure your LaunchPad account

Go to https://launchpad.net and create your own account.
Confirmation e-mail will be sent to your e-mail.
Get back to the terminal. Check your KEY id using:

gpg --list-secret-keys --keyid-format LONG

Output:

sec rsa3072/TESTKEY112233 2019-05-23 [SC] [expires: XXXX-XX-XX]
4C220144Fd0892C02CF337AC6F0BF90G43CDE61D
uid [ultimate] Rangsiman Ketkaew <test_test@gmail.com>
ssb rsa3072/XXXXXXXXX 2019-05-23 [E] [expires: XXXX-XX-XX]

Submit SSH key to Ubuntu server:

gpg --send-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com TESTKEY112233

Go to https://launchpad.net/~/+editpgpkeys
Append your Key Fingerprint (a long one) to text box, for example,

4C220144Fd0892C02CF337AC6F0BF90G43CDE61D

Then click “Import Key”.

Confirmation for LaunchPad

Ref: https://help.launchpad.net/ReadingOpenPgpMail

A confirmation e-mail will be sent to your e-mail.
In the e-mail there will be a long PGP KEY message like this:

---BEGIN PGP MESSAGE---
Version: GnuPG v1
xxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxx
---END PGP MESSAGE---

Open your terminal and create file call opgpm.txt.

vi opgpm.txt

Copy and paste the PGP message from the e-mail to the file.
Then execute the following command

gpg -d opgpm.txt

Output below confirms that a process is done successfully.

gpg: encrypted with 3072-bit RSA key, ID XXXXXXXXXXXX, created 2019-05-23
"Rangsiman Ketkaew test_test@gmail.com;"
...
...

Then submit SSH key to Ubuntu server again.

gpg --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --send-keys TESTKEY112233

Upload SSH key to LaunchPad

Go to https://launchpad.net/~/+editsshkeys
Copy a key from ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub and paste to text box and then click Import Public Key.

Configure the shell

Environment variable

export DEBFULLNAME="Rangsiman Ketkaew"
export DEBEMAIL="test_test@gmail.com"

Now save the file and either restart your terminal or run:

source ~/.bashrc

Prepare your program

In this post, I will use a simple program hello world as an example.
Download source code of GNU hello version 2.10 from its library.

wget -O hello-2.10.tar.gz "http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/hello/hello-2.10.tar.gz"

Uncompress the tarball:

tar xf hello-2.10.tar.gz
cd hello-2.10

This application uses the autoconf build system so we want to run ./configure to prepare for compilation.

./configure

Compile program and install it. Binary executable file of hello program will be installed at /usr/local/bin/.

make
sudo make install

Test program by running:

hello

Build .deb file

The following content is proposed by https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=910717 .

Decide on the name of your package. For example, you could name your first package

helloworld_2.10-1

Create a directory to make your package in. The name should be the same as the package name.

mkdir helloworld_2.10-1

Pretend that the packaging directory is actually the root of the file system. Put the files of your program where they would be installed to on a system.

mkdir helloworld_2.10-1/usr
mkdir helloworld_2.10-1/usr/local
mkdir helloworld_2.10-1/usr/local/bin
cp "~/Projects/Hello World/helloworld" helloworld_2.10-1/usr/local/bin

Now create a special metadata file with which the package manager will install your program…

mkdir helloworld_2.10-1/DEBIAN
gedit helloworld_2.10-1/DEBIAN/control

Put something like this in that file…

Package: helloworld
Version: 2.10-1
Section: base
Priority: optional
Architecture: i386
Depends: debhelper (>= 9)
Maintainer: Rangsiman Ketkaew <test_test@gmail.com>
Description: Hello World
When you need some sunshine, just run this
small program!

(the space before each line in the description is important)

Now you just need to make the package:

dpkg-deb --build helloworld_1.0-1

Done!

Tips

bzr-builddeb includes a plugin to create a new package from a template. The plugin is a wrapper around the dh_makecommand. Run the command providing the package name, version number, and path to the upstream tarball:

sudo apt-get install dh-make bzr-builddeb
bzr dh-make hello 2.10 hello-2.10.tar.gz

When it asks what type of package type s for single binary. This will import the code into a branch and add the debian/packaging directory. Have a look at the contents. Most of the files it adds are only needed for specialist packages (such as Emacs modules) so you can start by removing the optional example files:

cd hello/debian
rm *ex *EX