Simplified DEB Repository

2 years ago I wrote about creating a repository for DEB packages with the help of reprepro. And since then I suffer from the complexity of the process and cumbersome reprepro usage:

• Complicated to add support for new Ubuntu version which happens every 6 months
• Need to specifically handle new architectures
• I actually don't need most of the features that reprepro supports, e.g. managing multiple repos in one or package staging

This week I realized that for there is a much simpler solution for my needs: apt-ftparchive. This tool creates a trivial repo with just enough information to make apt happy. For my purposes that is enough. All what I want from a DEB repo is actually

• Work well with 50-500 packages
• Easy to add new Debian/Ubuntu/Raspbian versions or architectures
• Simple enough for me to understand
• GPG signatures

It turns out that the trivial repo format is enough for that, it makes it even simpler to add new distro versions because the repo does not contain any information about the distro versions. That means that the repo does not change for new distros and that I don't need to change the sources.list line after upgrades.

The following script maintains the repo. It will copy DEB packages given as command line parameters into the repository or simply recreate the metadata. The script uses gpg to sign the repo with your default GPG key. If you want to maintain a GPG key as part of the repo then you can create a key sub-directory which will be used as GPG home directory.

The script expects a config_for_release file in the repo that contains some extra information:

To add this repo to your system add something like this to your /etc/apt/sources.list: