How to build custom packages with Ubuntu Cloud Archive

This is a small guide tested on Ubuntu Trusty 14.04 to rebuild
packages from the Ubuntu Cloud Archive adding your own patches.

This is probably not the right way to build Ubuntu packages, but
it worked for me 🙂

Setup a VM with the necessary tools

Most of the steps are done by the Vagrant bootstrap.sh script.
After cloning the repository start the ubuntu VM with vagrant up.

Login into the VM and prepare the build env

At the first login prepare your env for trusty

sg sbuild
sbuild-update --keygen
mk-sbuild trusty

Download upstream sources

Now for example let’s rebuild the cinder package

apt-get source --download-only cinder-volume
gbp import-dsc cinder_2015.1.3-0ubuntu1.dsc

After these two command you will have a cinder folder that is a git
repository. An upstream branch contains the software version from upstream,
and the master branch contains the debian version.

Apply your own patch

New debian/ubuntu packages are built to hold the patches in a special folder:

cd cinder/
ls debian/patches/

Add your patch in debian/patches/
You can use the special folder /vagrant to copy the files from the host to
the VM (see Vagrant docs for details)

Add the namefile of your patch to debian/patches/series

Commit your changes

git add debian/patches/*
git commit -m "Commit msg that makes sense"

Update the debian changelog

Run this command to update the debian changelog

gbp dch

Eventually edit debian/changelog so that your package will have a proper
version name. In my cinder example the changelog looks like:

cinder (1:2015.1.3-0ubuntu1+switch0) trusty-kilo; urgency=medium

  * RBD: Make snapshot_delete more robust

 -- Saverio Proto <[email protected]>  Thu, 31 Mar 2016 20:18:06 +0000

cinder (1:2015.1.3-0ubuntu1) trusty-kilo; urgency=medium

  * New upstream stable release (LP: #1559215).

 -- James Page <[email protected]>  Sat, 19 Mar 2016 08:54:31 +0000

Now commit your changes to the changelog

git add debian/changelog
git commit --amend

Build the package

Start the build

sbuild-kilo -d trusty-amd64

If the build is successful you will find the new deb packages in the parent folder

ls ../

Saverio Proto is a cloud engineer at SWITCH, a national research and education network in Switzerland, which runs a public cloud for national universities. He first published this guide on GitHub. Hat tip to the ever-awesome Tom Fifield.

Cover Photo // CC BY NC