my personal package repository

Dec 30, 2012 · 2 minute read

I’m a big fan of system packages for lots of reasons and have often ended up rolling my own debian package repository at work, or working with others that have done so. Recently I finally got round to setting up a personal package repo, at packages.garethrushgrove.com. More interesting than the repo is probably the tool chain I used, oh and the rather nice bootstrap based styling.

The source code for everything is on GitHub although not much documentation exists yet. In the middle are a few shell scripts that generate the repo. Around them is a Vagrant box (which makes it easier to build packages for different achitectures or distros) and some Rake commands

<code>bundle exec rake -T
rake recipes:build[recipe]  # Build a package from one of the available recipes
rake recipes:list           # List available recipes
rake repo:build             # Build the repository</code>

The recipes commands allow for building new packages based on scripts. A few examples are included which use fpm, but you could use anything. The repo:build command triggers the debian repository to be rebuilt.

The vagrant configuration shares various folders between and guest and host which also opens up a few useful features. One is I can just drop any old debian package into the debs folder and run the repo:build command and it will be in my repository. The other useful capability is that the resulting repo is shared back to the host, which means I can then check it into Git and in my case push it up to Heroku.