Gradle is a great tool for setting up and building your Java projects. If you want to deliver them for Ubuntu or other debian-based distributions you should consider building .deb packages. Because of the quite steep learning curve of debian packaging I want to show you a step-by-step guide to get you up to speed.

Prerequisites

You have a project that can be built by gradle using gradle wrapper. In addition you have a debian-based system where you can install and use the packaging utilities used to create the package metadata and the final packages.

To prepare the debian system you have to install some packages:

sudo apt install dh-make debhelper javahelper

Generating packaging infrastructure

First we have to generate all the files necessary to build full fledged debian packages. Fortunately, there is a tool for that called dh_make. To correctly prefill the maintainer name and e-mail address we have to set 2 environment variables. Of course, you could change them later…

export DEBFULLNAME="John Doe"
export DEBEMAIL="john.doe@company.net"
cd $project_root
dh_make --native -p $project_name-$version

Choose “indep binary” (“i”) as type of package because Java is architecture indendepent. This will generate the debian directory containing all the files for creating .deb packages. You can safely ignore all of the files ending with .ex as they are examples features like manpage-generation, additional scripts pre- and post-installation and many other aspects.

We will concentrate on only two files that will allow us to build a nice basic package of our software:

1. control
2. rules

Adding metadata for our Java project

In the control file fill all the properties if relevant for your project. They will help your users understand what the package contains and whom to contact in case of problems. You should add the JRE to depends, e.g.:

Depends: openjdk-8-jre, ${misc:Depends}

If you have other dependencies that can be resolved by packages of the distribution add them there, too.

Define the rules for building our Java project

The most important file is the rules makefile which defines how our project is built and what the resulting package contents consist of. For this to work with gradle we use the javahelper dh_make extension and override some targets to tune the results. Key in all this is that the directory debian/$project_name/ contains a directory structure with all our files we want to install on the target machine. In our example we will put everything into the directory /opt/my_project.

#!/usr/bin/make -f
# -*- makefile -*-

# Uncomment this to turn on verbose mode.
#export DH_VERBOSE=1

%:
	dh $@ --with javahelper # use the javahelper extension

override_dh_auto_build:
	export GRADLE_USER_HOME="`pwd`/gradle"; \
	export GRADLE_OPTS="-Dorg.gradle.daemon=false -Xmx512m"; \
	./gradlew assemble; \
	./gradlew test

override_dh_auto_install:
	dh_auto_install
# here we can install additional files like an upstart configuration
	export UPSTART_TARGET_DIR=debian/my_project/etc/init/; \
	mkdir -p $${UPSTART_TARGET_DIR}; \
	install -m 644 debian/my_project.conf $${UPSTART_TARGET_DIR};

# additional install target of javahelper
override_jh_installlibs:
	LIB_DIR="debian/my_project/opt/my_project/lib"; \
	mkdir -p $${LIB_DIR}; \
	install lib/*.jar $${LIB_DIR}; \
	install build/libs/*.jar $${LIB_DIR};
	BIN_DIR="debian/my_project/opt/my_project/bin"; \
	mkdir -p $${BIN_DIR}; \
	install build/scripts/my_project_start_script.sh $${BIN_DIR}; \

Most of the above should be self-explanatory. Here some things that cost me some time and I found noteworthy:

• Newer Gradle version use a lot memory and try to start a daemon which does not help you on your build slaves (if using a continous integration system)
• The rules file is in GNU make syntax and executes each command separately. So you have to make sure everything is on “one line” if you want to access environment variables for example. This is achieved by \ as continuation character.
• You have to escape the $ to use shell variables.

Summary

Debian packaging can be daunting at first but using and understanding the tools you can build new packages of your projects in a few minutes. I hope this guide helps you to find a starting point for your gradle-based projects.