Tutorial

This tutorial will guide you through setting up your first project using dh-virtualenv. Having some knowledge on how Debian packages work won’t hurt, but it is not necessary a mandatory requirement. You also need some basic build tools, so it is recommended to install build-essential and devscripts packages.

Step 1: Install dh-virtualenv

In order to use it, you need to install the dh-virtualenv. If you run Debian Jessie (testing), Debian Sid (unstable) or Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty), you can install dh-virtualenv simply with apt-get:

sudo apt-get install dh-virtualenv

For other systems the only way is to build and install it yourself. Steps to do that, after you have cloned the repository are:

sudo apt-get install devscripts python-virtualenv git equivs # Install needed packages
git clone https://github.com/spotify/dh-virtualenv.git       # Clone Git repository
cd dh-virtualenv                                             # Move into the repository
sudo mk-build-deps -ri                                       # This will install build dependencies
dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc -b                                 # Build the *dh-virtualenv* package

# and finally, install it (you might have to solve some
# dependencies when doing this):
sudo dpkg -i ../dh-virtualenv_<version>.deb

Step 2: Setup the Debian packaging

Grab your favourite Python project you want to use dh-virtualenv with and set it up. Only requirement is that your project has a somewhat sane setup.py and requirements listed in a requirements.txt file. Note however that the defining requirements is not mandatory.

Next you need to define the Debian packaging for your software. To do this, create a directory called debian in the project root.

To be able to build a debian package, a few files are needed. First, we need to define the compatibility level of the project. For this, do:

echo "9" > debian/compat

The 9 is a magic number for latest compatibility level, but we don’t need to worry about that. Next we need a file that tells what our project is about, a file called control. Enter a following debian/control file:

Source: my-awesome-python-software
Section: python
Priority: extra
Maintainer: Matt Maintainer <matt@example.com>
Build-Depends: debhelper (>= 9), python, dh-virtualenv
Standards-Version: 3.9.5

Package: my-awesome-python-software
Architecture: any
Depends: ${python:Depends}, ${misc:Depends}
Description: really neat package!
 second line can contain extra information about it.

The control file is used to define the build dependencies, so if you are building a package that requires for example lxml, make sure you define libxml2-dev in Build-Depends etc.

Depends in the lower section is used to define run-time dependencies. Following the example above, in case of lxml you would add libxml2 in to the Depends field.

Next, we need a changelog file. It is basically a documentation of changes in your package plus the source for version number for Debian package builder. Here’s a short sample changelog to be entered in debian/changelog:

my-awesome-python-software (0.1-1) unstable; urgency=low

  * Initial public release

 -- Matt Maintainer <matt@example.com>  Fri, 01 Nov 2013 17:00:00 +0200

You don’t need to create this file by hand, a handy tool called dch exists for entering new changelog entries.

Now, last bit is left, which is the debian/rules file. This file is basically a Makefile that Debian uses to build the package. Content for that is fairly straightforward:

#!/usr/bin/make -f

%:
      dh $@ --with python-virtualenv

And there we go, debianization of your new package is ready!

Step 3: Build your project

Now you can just build your project by running dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc. Enjoy your newly baked dh-virtualenv backed project! :)