this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2026
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Debian operating system

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Debian is a free operating system (OS) for your computer. An operating system is the set of basic programs and utilities that make your computer run. Debian provides more than a pure OS: it comes with over 59000 packages, precompiled software bundled up in a nice format for easy installation on your machine.

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Would like to try packaging software (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
submitted 3 days ago by protogen420@lemmy.blahaj.zone to c/debian@lemmy.ml
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I have some cool projects that I use such as zellij and yazi that I use but aren't in the debian repos, I would like to attempt to package them myself, is there any guides on how to do such? were could I get some help learning how to package things?

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[–] dan@upvote.au 7 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Essentially you just need to:

  1. Build the correct directory structure within a subdirectory (e.g ./package/usr/bin for binaries, ./package/usr/share for docs, etc). This needs to include a few Debian-specific files, like a control file that contains metadata for the package, a copyright file, install and uninstall scripts if needed, etc.
  2. Use dpkg-deb to package the files into a .deb file.
  3. Run lintian to check that there's no issues with the package.

There's probably newer tools, but these are the core ones that have been part of Debian forever (and thus are very well-documented online).

You can then use Aptly to create a custom repo, or deb-get to install packages from Github releases.

I worked on the Debian packaging for Yarn v1. You can see the script that creates deb and rpm packages here: https://github.com/yarnpkg/yarn/blob/master/scripts/build-deb.sh (this uses fpm to build the rpm package, and the native Debian tools to build the deb package)

One thing I don't have experience with is submitting packages to the official Debian repo, so I can't help with that.