Creating an Alpine package

DRAFT

This document assumes that you have a working build environment, or use a diskbased alpine installation.

The APKBUILDs

The abuild script reads the APKBUILD and executes the steps needed to create a package.

The aports tree

The aports tree is a directory tree with many APKBUILDs. Those files are used when building alpine from source.

Installing and configuring the alpine-sdk

The alpine-sdk is a metapackage that pulls in the most essinsial packages used to build new packages. To install those packages:

 apk add alpine-sdk

The aports tree is in git so before we can clone the aports tree we need to install and configure git. We need to tell git our name and email.

 git config --global user.name "Your Full Name"
 git config --global user.email "your@email.address"

Now we can clone the aports tree.

 git clone git://dev.alpinelinux.org/aports

Creating an APKBUILD file

 cd aports && mkdir $pkgname
 cp /usr/share/abuild/APKBUILD.proto $pkgname/APKBUILD

Edit APKBUILD and fill in the needed info (especially pkgname, pkgver, pkgdesc, url, license, depends and source)

Build the package

 cd $pkgname
 abuild checksum >> APKBUILD
 abuild

Add any custom configure option into proper line of build() section

Splitting packages

For packages that install man and info files, it's better to put these file in a separated $pkgname-doc package. Edit APKBUILD and add:

 subpackages="$pkgname-doc"

Be sure to put man files in /usr/share/man and info files in /usr/share/info. You need to re-run abuild to regenerate program and doc packages

Commit your work

Update you git repo, before adding new files:

 cd $aportsdir
 git pull git://dev.alpinelinux.org/aports
 git add extra/$pkgname/APKBUILD
 git commit -v -m'extra/$pkgname: new aport'

If your package belongs to core or testing, replace extra accordingly. Send the file 000x-extra-$pkgname-new-aport.patch in the current dir to alpine-devel@lists.alpinelinux.org