In this post I’m doing a home assignment for Tero Karvinen’s course of linux servers. The assignment is to build a metapackage that installs a bunch of software in a single package, to create a local package repository and to package a script so it installs a new command to all users. I’m going to do this on my desktop computer. The computer is i5-3570k (4X, 3,8GHz, 6M) 16GB RAM, 2x Asus GeForce GTX 560 TI in SLI mode. Using the xubuntu live-USB stick. I divided this post to two parts, part two ->.
Building a metapackage
This part was very easy, by using ‘equivs’.
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install equivs -y
This command installs the latest packaged version of equivs on your system. For the assignment, I’m doing my own LAMP installation metapackage, containing only the things I need for a minimal installation.
mkdir mmm-lamp cd mmm-lamp equivs-control mmm-lamp
The ‘equivs-control’ command creates the basic structure for your own package and the ‘mmm-lamp’ is the name I gave for my package.
I modified the text file like so:
Section: misc Priority: optional Homepage: https://miro.metsanheimo.fi Standards-Version: 3.9.2 Package: mmm-lamp Version: 0.0.1 Maintainer: Miro Metsänheimo <miro@metsanheimo.fi> Depends: apache2, mariadb-server, php5, php5-mysql, libapache2-mod-php5 Description: Miro Metsänheimo's own LAMP package LAMP package with minimal installation
The line that defines the package as a metapackage is the ‘depends’ line. There we list all the packages we want installed in the package.
- apache2: The basic and most used web server software
- mariadb-server: My favourite fork of the MySQL database software
- php5: PHP package
- php5-mysql: PHP module that makes it work well with MySQL
- libapache2-mod-php5: Apache module that makes apache work well with PHP.
Now to build the package to an installable ‘.deb’ file.
equivs-build mmm-lamp
Now I have a package called ‘mmm-lamp_0.0.1_all.deb’ in the same folder.
Now to check if it goes through ‘lintian’.
lintian mmm-lamp_0.0.1_all.deb
It returns nothing, that means it doesn’t contain bugs or policy violations and should install fine.
Creating a package repository
I’ll be doing this using ‘reprepro’, it is required to have a web server running for this to work. I’m doing this over Apache that I installed using the metapackage I just created.
sudo apt-get install reprepro -y gpg --gen-key
The GnuPG key generator will ask a series of questions in order to make the key. The recommended are the default options, so I just spammed enter until I got my key.
It also asked my real name, e-mail and a passphrase for the key. After that it needs a lot of random bytes, so it recommended me to type on my keyboard and move my mouse etc. to “collect more entropy”.
After the key is complete or meanwhile it’s in the making, lets create the folder structure for our repository
sudo mkdir -p apt/incoming sudo mkdir -p apt/conf sudo mkdir -p apt/key
The -p option makes the required parents for the directory.
The next command exports the created gpg key to the repository.
sudo gpg --armor --export Miro Metsänheimo miro@metsanheimo.fi >> /var/www/apt/key/deb.gpg.key
Then we need to create a file called ‘distributions’ in the ‘conf’ folder. And add some content to it.
sudoedit /var/www/apt/conf/distributions
I added these lines:
Origin: Miro Metsänheimo Label: mmm-repo Suite: stable Codename: first-repo Version: 14.04 Architectures: amd64 Components: universe Description: My own repo SignWith: yes
Now to create the repository with the configuration and the gpg-key:
sudo reprepro --ask-passphrase -Vb /var/www/apt export
And to add my own metapackage to the repository:
sudo reprepro --ask-passphrase -Vb . includedeb first-repo /home/xubuntu/Desktop/mmm-lamp/mmm-lamp_0.0.1_all.deb
Now I have a repository published on my Apache web server!
I wrote the home assignment in two parts, because the other one would better fit in another article. Part two ->
Sources
Class by Tero Karvinen