debify

This is a cross-platform utility for creating DEB-packages. It is written in
pure JavaScript and doesn't rely on any system utilities (such as dpkg, ar,
tar, etc), so it can be used on MacOS, Windows, and GNU/Linux.

Initially debify was intended to be used for creating DEB-packages from
single-page web applications, so that they can be installed into Debian based
GNU/Linux distributions in a proper way, i.e. using standard package managers
like apt, aptitude or dpkg, but since it's a general tool, you can
"debify" anything you want.

Installation

`` bash
$ npm install -g debify
`

Usage

This utility requires two arguments: DATA_DIRECTORY and CONTROL_DIRECTORY:

` bash
$ debify
`

It creates a DEB-package using contents of DATA_DIRECTORY and metadata from
CONTROL_DIRECTORY which must contain at least control file—the binary
package control file
with the control fields for the package. There are five mandatory control
fields: Package, Version, Architecture, Maintainer, and Description.
The fields can have hard-coded values or can refer to environment variables
using ${VARIABLE_NAME} syntax. All other metadata files (such as conffiles,
postinst, postrm, preinst and prerm) is used as well if present in
CONTROL_DIRECTORY.

Example

Let's say there is a web application (named example) which consists of three
files: index.html, index.js and index.css. To create a DEB-package which
installs them into /var/www/example directory, we will need a control file
like this one:

`
Package: example
Version: 1.0.0${SUFFIX}
Architecture: all
Maintainer: John Doe
Description: An example web-application
`

Also we will need data and debian directories. We will place index.html,
index.js and index.css into desired subdirectory under the former directory,
and the newly created control file into the latter directory. At the end we
should got the following directory structure:

`
example
├── data
│   └── var
│   └── www
│   └── example
│   ├── index.css
│   ├── index.html
│   └── index.js
└── debian
└── control
`

No we can launch debify utility giving it paths to data and debian
directories as the fist and second arguments respectively (we assume that
current working directory is example):

` bash
$ debify data debian
`

This will create the DEB-package in the current working directory. According to
the control file it will be named example_1.0.0-all.deb, but since Version
control field refers to SUFFIX environment variable, we can use it for
creating release candidates (example_1.0.0rc1-all.deb) without changing the
control file:

` bash
$ SUFFIX=rc1 debify data debian
``