Provide debian package repository from Windows 7 machine

Question

I have some scripts, bundled in a .deb-file. Those package will later be installed on x clients.
While I won't update those scripts manually on every client, I would like to provide the .deb-file on one of our servers (all running on Windows). For testing purposes I would like to try to distribute it over my local Windows 7 machine.

Answer 1

Providing package repositories isn't that complex.

You first need to allow access to your windows 7 maschine by either HTTP or FTP Then you have to mirror the correspoding version(s) to the directory you shared via http or ftp.

But of course you must have the "correct" content to put in these directories. For linux you could use these instructions:

http://linuxconfig.org/easy-way-to-create-a-debian-package-and-local-package-repository

But doing the same thing under windows is probably not easy. But since you probably anyway have access to a debian system to build the .deb packages, why not generate the repository there and then ransfer the content to your windows system?

Answer 2

The most simple way is probably to use a virtual machine, install debian into the vm and use debian to serve the packages.

Answer 3

It all depends on whether you want this package to be apt-get-table (that is, you want to host a package repository which would contain your package) or if you want to just make this package downloadable by hand.

In the latter case you just would want to enable IIS and simply offer downloads of this file. On each client system you would then need to download it (using an Internet browser or using command-line tools like wget or curl) and then install it using

dpkg -i /path/to/package.deb

The upside of this approach is that it's super-simple for a one-off operation. The downside is that dpkg does not automatically fetch and install the dependencies (that's what APT is for).

If, instead, you want to host a repository, this is way more complicated in your case as the repository must have a special structure with a set of (automatically generated) files. To maintain a repository, a set of tools exist (with reprepro being arguably the most useful), but to my knowledge none of them works on Windows.

This means you will need to maintain the repository on one of your Debian machines and then transfer (or sync it) with its mirror on your Windows machine (which means messing with FTP or SMB or rsync or whatever else). I think this is more hassle than setting up a HTTP server on a Debian box which hosts the repository and making it serve that repository right away.