Bundle your custom apps in a Debian package

It's a Wrap

Article from ADMIN 01/2010

By Dan Frost

Get standard scripts and custom applications into the cloud with the Debian packaging system.

You've got a cloud. It's great. You can scale, and you've got redundancy. But you have about 20 scripts for a bunch of tasks (e.g., one for when an instance is booted up and another for when its IP changes) and these scripts aren't getting any shorter, they're getting better and longer. If you want to manage them in your favorite versioning software (which I hope is Git, but might be something else), how do you get that onto the new instances simply?

Enter the not-new-at-all technology of Debian packages. They are straightforward to use across any Debian-based Linux and simple to create, and they provide an ideal way of containing and releasing your scripts.

In this article, I'll show how to create Debian packages and how to install them (which you probably already know). And, I'll explain how the process will make you feel more comfortable about pushing changes live across your cloud. I talked to cloudy people about how to get code onto new instances, and I tried lots of different things, but the Debian package is such a solid, reliable format that I just had to share it.

Debian Packages

Debian packages are simply archives that are very easy to install, usually in one line. If you've ever worked with packages in Ubuntu or any other Debian-related Linux, you've probably needed to download a package from an online source and install it:

apt-get install <I>blarblar<I>.deb

On the inside, a Debian package is an archive of binary files, scripts, and any other resources an application needs, plus a handful of control files that the various command-line tools use to install the package.

Because this standard package format is so easy to install on any Debian-based Linux, it's a great way to get standard scripts and custom applications into the cloud. Often you need a few lines to configure a new instance or to

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