Easy way to host a debian update repository

Question

I have a project where I create a single .deb file, which should be installed by a linux client. For this I would like to use apt-get install mypackage.

Being quite new to this area, I am now looking for the most simple way of hosting my own debian update repository, which will only have to contain mypackage.deb.

I quickly looked at mini-dinstall which looked promising, but they seem to work with .changes, rather than .deb packages. So I am not sure if this is what I need.

So summarized the workflow should look something like this:

1. I create the debian package mypackage.deb
2. I tell some daemon to update the update repository: fancy-update-daemon add mypackage.deb
3. The client is able to install or update using standard apt commands: apt-get install mypackage

Thanks for your help

Answer 1

The really simple way of creating a repository is to create a "trivial" repository instead of an "automatic" repository. You can do this with the "dpkg-scanpackages" command in the dpkg-dev package.

$ mkdir repository
$ cp foo.deb repository
$ dpkg-scanpackages repository /dev/null | gzip -9c > repository/Packages.gz

Then in your sources.list, instead of having something like:

deb http://wherever/repository suite component

You leave off the suite and component and just have:

deb http://wherever/repository

For more info (like the difference between a trivial and automatic repository) see The repository HOWTO (for something this simple, you can ignore the fact that this documentation calls itself "obsolete")

Answer 2

Create Packages.gz:

@server> cd debian-repo
@server> dpkg-scanpackages ./ /dev/null | gzip > Packages.gz

Create new file /etc/apt/sources.list.d/my-server.list (at client)

deb http://my-server/debian-repo ./

Now get the list of available packages and install foo.

@client> apt-get update
@client> apt-get install foo