unipkg

Multi-platform implementation of dpkg (in Javascript) with a programming and command-line interface.

Requirements

This project has been tested (via our Jest tests) on Node v18.20.3 and v20.15.0.

The project depends on fs-extra, klaw, tmp, tar, all of which should be installed by NPM or Yarn when installing the package. This should in theory run on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Installation

unipkg can be installed by either NPM or Yarn, however, for the average user unipkg can be globally installed (meaning the unipkg binaries and libraries are in your path) by running

npm install -g unipkg

or, of course, locally by running

npm install unipkg

Usage

unipkg has both a interface for Node.js as well as a command-line interface. The command line usage is as follows:

Usage: unipkg [options] [command]

Options:

  -V, --version                output the version number
  -h, --help                   output usage information

Commands:

  scan|s <directory>
      Implementation of the dpkg-scanpackages -m command.
  <directory> is the directory to be scanned for Debian packages (.deb files).
  these will be added to a Packages index file which will be output in the current
  directory.

  build|b <directory> [<out>]
      Implementation of the dpkg-deb -b command.
  <directory> is the well structured package folder which should
  contain both the DEBIAN folder and the data of the package.
  [<deb>] is the optional output filename and path of the resulting Debian
  format archive. It defaults to outputting a deb file in the current working
  directory using the standard Debian name scheme.

The following is boilerplate code for the Node.js interface. The Node.js interface has the same usage and parameters as the CLI. Each function will return a Promise.

const dpkg = require("unipkg");
const pkg = "path/to/repo/deb/root";
const repo = "path/to/repo"

dpkg.build(pkg).then(
  path => {
    console.log(`The Debian package ${path} has been successfully written.`);
  },
  err => {
    console.error(`Error: ${err}`);
  }
);

dpkg.scan(repo).then(
  path => {
    console.log(`Your repository has been successfully created.`);
  },
  err => {
    console.error(`Error: ${err}`);
  }
)

Contributing

Feel free to submit issues or pull requests to the repository. Before contributing, please read our Contributing Guide.

Related Readings

• Overview of control file fields
• Debian Maintainer's Guide
• Environment Variable Definition
• ar File Format

Related Software

Despite my best efforts to initially find alternative software before beginning development of this project, before publishing I found several alterative to this package. Honestly, if I had found these before probably would not have persued writing my own library for this.

1. debpkg by xor-gate is a is a pure Go library to create Debian packages. It has zero dependencies to Debian. It is able to generate packages from Mac OS X, *BSD and Windows.
2. dpkg-build by wr1241 seems to be a largely non-active repository, however, it provides much of the same functionality of this library's API (sans CLI).