The Debian Build System
Explore the Debian build system to understand its standardized process, key files, and tools like debhelper. Learn how to create minimal Debian packages by setting up control, changelog, and rules files and building them with dpkg-buildpackage.
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Most or even all packages in the official Debian repository use the same build system based on a standard directory layout.
This build system reads files within the debian directory of the project and typically involves the
This standard build system is structured in a sequence of phases that
assemble the files for the final Debian package in the directory
debian/<packagename>. At the end, one of the debhelper tools, dh_builddeb, is called to create the
actual .deb file.
A minimal package
Let’s use the debhelper toolchain to create a minimal Debian package called hello-debian.
We start with an empty directory for our We start with an empty directory for our project, create a debian directory in it, and declare our debhelper compatibility level:
$ mkdir -p hello-debian/debian$ cd hello-debian/debian$ echo 13 > compat
At the time of writing, the highest compatibility level is 13, and levels lower than 10 are not recommended.
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