debify

This is a cross-platform utility for creating DEB-packages. It is written in pure JavaScript and doesn't rely on any system utilities (such as dpkg, ar, tar, etc), so it can be used on MacOS, Windows, and GNU/Linux.

Initially debify was intended to be used for creating DEB-packages from single-page web applications, so that they can be installed into Debian based GNU/Linux distributions in a proper way, i.e. using standard package managers like apt, aptitude or dpkg, but since it's a general tool, you can "debify" anything you want.

Installation

$ npm install -g debify

Usage

This utility requires two arguments: DATA_DIRECTORY and CONTROL_DIRECTORY:

$ debify <DATA_DIRECTORY> <CONTROL_DIRECTORY>

It creates a DEB-package using contents of DATA_DIRECTORY and metadata from CONTROL_DIRECTORY which must contain at least control file—the binary package control file with the control fields for the package. There are five mandatory control fields: Package, Version, Architecture, Maintainer, and Description. The fields can have hard-coded values or can refer to environment variables using ${VARIABLE_NAME} syntax. All other metadata files (such as conffiles, postinst, postrm, preinst and prerm) is used as well if present in CONTROL_DIRECTORY.

Example

Let's say there is a web application (named example) which consists of three files: index.html, index.js and index.css. To create a DEB-package which installs them into /var/www/example directory, we will need a control file like this one:

Package: example
Version: 1.0.0${SUFFIX}
Architecture: all
Maintainer: John Doe <john.doe@example.com>
Description: An example web-application

Also we will need data and debian directories. We will place index.html, index.js and index.css into desired subdirectory under the former directory, and the newly created control file into the latter directory. At the end we should got the following directory structure:

example
├── data
│   └── var
│       └── www
│           └── example
│               ├── index.css
│               ├── index.html
│               └── index.js
└── debian
    └── control

No we can launch debify utility giving it paths to data and debian directories as the fist and second arguments respectively (we assume that current working directory is example):

$ debify data debian

This will create the DEB-package in the current working directory. According to the control file it will be named example_1.0.0-all.deb, but since Version control field refers to SUFFIX environment variable, we can use it for creating release candidates (example_1.0.0rc1-all.deb) without changing the control file:

$ SUFFIX=rc1 debify data debian