Building deb Package Using Docker

While you can build deb packages by installing the necessary requirements and running the commands on your local machine, I prefer not to as it litters the system with random dev packages.

In the past, I used a debootstrab schroot. But that’s a ton of configuration steps that can be easily avoided by using Docker!

Assuming you have Docker already installed… (make sure your user is in the docker group)

First, install the debocker package. It’s a helper tool to run all the necessary commands.

Next, download the sources you need (dsc, orig.tar.gz, debian.tar.xz, etc) for your package. In my case, I wanted to build the latest experimental yosys for 18.04.

$ cd testbuild

$ wget http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/y/yosys/yosys_0.8-1build1.dsc
$ wget http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/y/yosys/yosys_0.8.orig.tar.gz
$ wget http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/y/yosys/yosys_0.8-1build1.debian.tar.xz

$ dpkg-source -x yosys_0.8-1build1.dsc

$ cd yosys-0.8

# may need to fix the debian/changelog file

$ debocker build --image ubuntu:18.04

Assuming everything went okay, you should have a bunch of .deb files built!