I own a company that does custom ecommerce packages, while the core is always the same, companies can buy addons etc. We have a hosting facility, but sometimes the customers want the server on-site. Here is my problem..


Right now everytime we have an update on the core, not the addons, all of the customers need to be updated. We currently apply patched files by hand. and send cd's to the customer and have them walk through a .pdf manual to install it.. hoping the install goes right, or even attempted at all . What I am wondering is, is it possible to make a .deb file from just a /var/www directory? It would be a MAJOR improvement to what we currently do as far as updating the software.. And all of our machines use debian anyway.

I have been reading the new maintainers guide, and I find that it is overkill since I am not installing, configuring, binaries etc.

Would be great to just have a .deb so we could script a timer that checked for dist-updates and would unpack the .deb and overwrite the current /var/www directory...

If this is not possible does anyone else know of a similarly easier idea?



Conrad

Here's an article that might help you get started.
http://linuxdevices.com/articles/AT8047723203.html

Regards.

That was definitely more help than the debian guide, but never the less, i am still at a point where it seems everything is driven around binaries etc.. I have googled more into it, and have found a few examples of what i am looking for... The closest is, how the apache .deb creates and places index.html in /var/www... Has anyone had similar experience with this, or seen a similar HowTo

I FIGURED IT OUT!!!!

Post what you did for future reference.

SURE THING!!! Although I doubt this will make a sticky ....but if anyone gets stuck, and happens to find us I created a folder called mypackage in it I recreated the path to my apache directory IE (mypackage has a subfolder /var and in that has a subfolder /www) so /mypackage/var/www has the files copied over from my real /var/www directory,

In the same directory as /var i have a folder named DEBIAN inside it is a control file mine looks like the following

Package: mypackage
Version: 0.04
Section: web
Architecture: all
Installed-Size: 15024
Maintainer: myname <myemail@mydomain.com>
Provides: rcs
Description: description of my package.

after having that, I ran the following command from /mypackage/var
dpkg -b /mypackage mypackage.deb

THATS IT. So here is an over view
/mypackage
/var /DEBIAN
| |
/www /control file
|
All of my files

Things to note after the fact.....
1. You can just throw a DEBIAN folder in the same directory as the begining of you 1st path IE, I could have placed the /DEBIAN folder in my real /var, but since it was my 1st try, I wanted to make sure I was messing with a backup
2. If you don't up the version in the control file IE change 0.04 to 0.05 the system won't take ANY new changes.
3. I wouldn't know how loose you can keep these settings, meaning, none of my files are really binary outside of some .jpg's etc.. so if you are using .bin and/or .sh files you might want to refer to the debian site for a complete explanation of running pre and post scripts.
4. I am REALLY tired right now, so if this doesn't make any sense to someone, you can just email me, and I will try and help.

Conrad

Makes sense. Thanks. However, I guess it would become more difficult and involved when there are dependencies and such which should be handled.

Regards.

Yup, it acts a lot like a .tar.gz file with a bash script that will overwrite with the limited files i have