After several days on and off of tinkering, I have finally managed to create a complete Ubuntu package repository. There were several major steps/features required in this project:

1. Generating deb files


2. Generating repository file structure


3. Generating package files


4. Generating release files


5. Signing release files

Over the next few days I will attempt to explain how I achieved this, step by step so others can follow.

I built my repository mainly as a method of maintaining desktop machines and servers on my internal network. It includes a few packages that aren't in the Ubuntu repositories (libdvdcss2, w32codecs, gaim2beta5 etc.), as well as a set of custom built packages and meta (virtual) packages used to configure desktops and servers automatically (still under construction).

I used several sources during this project (unfortunately I haven't kept track of them), no one of them I found to be entirely fulfilling, perhaps there is a difference between pure Debian repositories and Ubuntu repositories, or perhaps the process/tools/format has changed since those documents were written. Anyhow, my setup is running fine on Ubuntu 6.10 server/clients, so I hope these posts will be useful to others trying to create their own repository.