With minimal Tools

  • This is the most basic variant with minimal tools involved (quick-n-dirty).
  • You can go even more low-level with ar but that is not pragmatic anymore...
  • This variant should only be used if all other variants are not possible...

Install necessary tools

apt-get install fakeroot

fakeroot is needed so that the files in the package are owned by "root"
and not by the user who builds the package.

root (UID 0) exists on every linux system, but the current user's ID very likely does not

mkdir -p ~/packaging/foo/DEBIAN

This is the only time the DEBIAN folder needs to be in uppercase
since we use some lower level tools which still expect this...

Tools like debhelper and others use the lowercase variant.

mkdir -p ~/packaging/foo/usr/bin/

~/packaging/foo/usr/bin/foo

#!/usr/bin/env bash
  
echo "foo"

chmod +x ~/packaging/foo/usr/bin/foo

~/packaging/foo/DEBIAN/control

Package: foo
Version: 0.1-1
Architecture: all
Maintainer: Sven Wick <sven.wick@gmx.de>
Description: short description for foo

fakeroot dpkg-deb --build ~/packaging/foo/

dpkg-deb -c ~/packaging/foo.deb

drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2021-12-17 01:01 ./
drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2021-12-17 01:01 ./usr/
drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2021-12-17 01:01 ./usr/bin/
-rwxr-xr-x root/root        34 2021-12-17 01:01 ./usr/bin/foo

dpkg-deb -I ~/packaging/foo.deb

 new Debian package, version 2.0.
 size 740 bytes: control archive=304 bytes.
     126 bytes,     5 lines      control              
 Package: foo
 Version: 0.1-1
 Architecture: all
 Maintainer: Sven Wick <sven.wick@gmx.de>
 Description: short description for foo