Building Debian packages with Maven
How do you distribute and deploy you java applications and
libraries? Especially if you are using Debian/Ubuntu machines
the desire to just install them like any other software with
“apt-get install” comes just with that. But how do
you integrate this with you build system? You could of course
have the debian tools installed on the build bot and have that
generate the deb. But wouldn’t it be nice to have your
java build system take care of that too? Cross platform
packaging is why I started
jdeb. What started
out as a little library with an ant task has now gotten a bit
more flexible. Today I am happy to announce that with the new
release of 0.3 there is also a maven plugin available. Just add
this to your POM and your are good to go. When you call
“mvn install” you will also find the Debian archive
in the target directory.
<plugin>
<artifactId>jdeb</artifactId>
<groupId>org.vafer</groupId>
<version>0.3</version>
<executions>
<execution>
<phase>package</phase>
<goals>
<goal>deb</goal>
</goals>
</execution>
</executions>
</plugin>
You can even get the appropriate changes file generated. Please
see the
documentation for further details
and let me know if you have any questions. For the ones
upgrading from 0.2 – it should be (more or less) a drop in
replacement. For more details on the changes see the
project website.


