Deployment of software using built-in software management tools is very convenient and provides a nice user experience (UX) for the users. For debian-based linux distributions like Ubuntu packaging software in .deb-packages is the way to go. So how can we prepare our python projects for packaging as a deb-package? The good news is that python is supported out-of-the-box in the debian package build system.

Alternatively, you can use the distutils-extension stdeb if you do not need complete flexibility in creating the packages.

Basic python deb-package

If you are using setuptools/distutils for your python project debian packaging consists of editing the package metadata and adding --with python to the rules file. For a nice headstart we can generate templates of the debian metadata files using two simple commands (the debhelper package is needed for dh_make:

# create a tarball with the current project sources
python setup.py sdist
# generate the debian package metadata files 
dh_make -p ${project_name}_${version} -f dist/${project_name}-${version}.tar.gz 

You have to edit at least the control-file, the changelog and the rules-file to build the python package. In the rules-file the make-target % is the crucial point and should include the flag to build a python project:

# main packaging script based on dh7 syntax
%:
	dh $@ --with python

After that you can build the package issueing dpkg-buildpackage.

The caveats

The debian packaging system is great in complaining about non-conformant aspects of your package. It demands digital signatures, correct file and directory names including version strings etc. Unfortunately it is not very helpful when you make packaging  mistakes resulting in empty, incomplete or broken packages.

Issues with setup.py

The setup.py build script has to reside on the same level as the debian-directory containing the package metadata. The packaging tools will not tell you if they could not find the setup script. In addition it will always run setup.py using python 2, even if you specified --with python3 in the rules-file.

Packaging for specific python versions

If you want better control over the target python versions for the package you should use Pybuild. You can do this by a little change to the rules-file, e.g. a python3-only build using Pybuild:

# main packaging script based on dh7 syntax
%:
	dh $@ --with python3 --buildsystem=pybuild

For pybuild to work it is crucial to add the needed python interpreter(s) besides the mandatory build dependency dh-python to the Build-Depends of the control-file, for python3-only it could look like this:

Build-Depends: debhelper (>=9), dh-python, python3-all
...
Depends: ${python3:Depends}

Without the dh-python build dependency pybuild will silently do nothing. Getting the build dependencies wrong will create incomplete or broken packages. Take extra care of getting this right!

Conclusion

Debian packaging looks quite intimidating at first because there are so many ways to build a package. Many different tools can ease package creation but also add confusion. Packaging python software is done easily if you know the quirks. The python examples from the Guide for Debian Maintainers are certainly worth a look!