Creating your own Debian packages

With this example I'll create a basic Tor browser bundle debian package - there are real maintained debian packages for tor this is only for testing purposes.

We will install the content into /usr/local and will create some links to launch the software into /usr/local/bin.

First download the latest Tor package (I assume we are using 64 bits) and extract the files in /tmp/tor-browser_en-US

Now in your home (or testing) folder, create a subfolder named "tor-browser-bundle". Now create the subfolder DEBIAN and usr/local:

$ mkdir -p tor-browser-bundle/DEBIAN

$ mkdir -p tor-browser-bundle/usr/local

Now copy the /tmp/tor-browser_en-US to the folder we just created:

$ mv /tmp/tor-browser_en-US tor-browser-bundle/usr/local

 Now, we create the file DEBIAN/control containing this template:

Package: tor-bundle-browser
Priority: optional
Section: devel
Installed-Size: 120
Maintainer: Andreu Martin
Architecture: amd64
Version: 0.1
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.0)
Description: Tor bundle browser test

Now we create the file tor-bundle-browser/DEBIAN/postinst with the post installation tasks. This file must have permissions  >=0555 and <=0775.

$ cat tor-browser-bundle/DEBIAN/postinst 

ln -s /usr/local/tor-browser_en-US/start-tor-browser /usr/local/bin/

cat <<-EOF > /usr/local/bin/start-tor-firefox

#!/bin/sh

/usr/local/tor-browser_en-US/App/Firefox/firefox -no-remote -profile /usr/local/tor-browser_en-US/Data/profile

EOF

chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/start-tor-firefox

          $ chmod 775 tor-browser-bundle/DEBIAN/postinst 

 Now we are ready to build the .deb:

          $ dpkg-deb -z9 -Zgzip --build tor-browser-bundle

(-z9 specifies compression level - 0 to 9, -Zgzip for compression type - gzip, xz, bzip2, lzma, or none)

 Now we have a tor-browser-bundle.deb ready to go.

Additional reading on debian packages on the official manual.