Admin Stuff

We first create the archive configuration file archive.conf. We store everything in a single directoy. Lets call this directory debian/. Into this directory we place the configuration file:

Dir {
    ArchiveDir ".";
}

BinDirectory "." {
    Packages "Packages";
    Sources "Sources";
    Contents "Contents-i386";
}

APT::FTPArchive::Release {
    Origin "SENF";
    Architectures "i386";
    Description "SENF debian repository. See http://senf.berlios.de";
}

The next step is to create a GnuPG configuration to sign the repository. For this purpose, we create a special gnupg directory in gnupg/ next to debian/.

 $ mkdir gnupg
 $ gpg --homedir gnupg --gen-key
 $ gpg --homedir gnupg --export --armor >debian/archive.key

We give the GnuPG some unique name and email address which is easily associated with the repository.

The last step is to create the update.sh script in the debian/ directory which will update the repository meta-data.

#!/bin/sh

cd "`dirname "$0"`"

apt-ftparchive generate archive.conf
rm -f Release*
apt-ftparchive -c archive.conf release . >Release.new
mv Release.new Release
gpg --homedir ~/gnupg --detach-sign --armor --output Release.gpg Release

That's it. The repository can now be accessed by adding the following lines to the /etc/apt/sources.list file.

 deb http://url.to/repo/debian/ ./
 deb-src http://url.to/repo/debian/ ./

To install the archive key into the list of trusted apt keys (and thereby stop apt from continually asking, wether it should install those untrusted packages), do the following:

 $ wget http://url.to/repo/debian/archive.key
 $ aot-key add archive.key

To verify the key, you can import it into gpg and check the fingerprint.