Create Ubuntu DEB Package from source code (.tar.gz, .tgz)

In this tutorial, we will show you how to create an Ubuntu DEB Package. Occasionally, we are dealing with software installation from source code by running configure, make, and make install. When we do it that way, we can not reverse the process (uninstall) it. To overcome that issue, we can build the source code into a DEB Package.

DEB, Debian packages are standard Unix archives that include two tar archives optionally compressed with gzip (zlib), Bzip2, lzma, or xz (lzma2): one archive holds the control information and another contains the program data. (Source: Wikipedia)

Create Ubuntu DEB Package from source code

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running these following apt commands in the terminal.

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Step 2. Create Ubuntu DEB Package.

• DEB builder dependencies

To start building deb package, we must install several dependencies:

apt-get update
apt-get install build-essential automake autoconf libtool pkg-config checkinstall

For this tutorial, I will show you how to build deb package of Dante Socks Server source code. The file can be obtained here: http://www.inet.no/dante/files/dante-1.3.2.tar.gz

• SSH Command list to build DEB Package

The following are command list to build Dante DEB package from source code:

wget http://www.inet.no/dante/files/dante-1.3.2.tar.gz
tar zxvf dante-1.3.2.tar.gz
cd dante-1.3.2
./configure
make
checkinstall

The last command “checkinstall” will have some response which you need to input. Once completed it will produce DEB file: “dante_1.3.2-1_amd64.deb”

• Install DEB Package

To install this package we can use the standard command:

dpkg -i dante_1.3.2-1_amd64.deb

All done now…

But, if somehow you want to uninstall it, you can do it easily using this command:

dpkg -r dante_1.3.2-1_amd64.deb

Congratulations! You have successfully created an Ubuntu deb package. Thanks for using this tutorial to create deb package on your Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa). For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official Ubuntu website.

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