Building debian package for phpredis

Background

phpredis is one of major library for using redis on PHP. It bundles a shell script to build debian package, so by using this you can easily do package-based server management.
However there’s two problem when you built the package with the script.

Two problems of the debian package built with bundled script

The first problem is that the installation fails because of following reason:

% sudo dpkg -i phpredis-x86_64.deb
(Reading database ... 42333 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking phpredis (from phpredis-x86_64.deb) ...
dpkg: error processing phpredis-x86_64.deb (--install):
 unable to open '/etc/php5/apache2/conf.d/redis.ini.dpkg-new': No such file or directory
Errors were encountered while processing:
 phpredis-x86_64.deb

The second problem is that the target architecture(e.g. amd64, i386) is not specified correctly.
It is specified as ‘any’. So if you have multiple architecture type in your operating servers, it will cause on deployment.

In next section, I explain how to fix there problems.

How to solve

1. open ‘mkdeb-apache2.sh’
2. Comment below line out

    28 dpkg -b debian phpredis-`uname -m`.deb
    29 #rm -rf debian/ # comment this line out
   

3. Run it.

   % ./mkdeb-apache2.sh

4. After running the script, you will get ‘debian’ directory as below:

   % ls -l
   debian/
   
   % ls debian/
   DEBIAN/  etc/  usr/
   

5. Make ‘conffiles’ with below command:

   % echo "/etc/php5/apache2/conf.d/redis.ini" > debian/DEBIAN/conffiles

6. Edit ‘Architecture’ field in ‘debian/DEBIAN/control’ file to your build environment architecture.

   Package: phpredis
   Version: 1.0
   Section: web 
   Priority: optional
   #Architecture: any
   Architecture: amd64    # edited
   Essential: no
   Depends: 
   Pre-Depends: 
   Recommends: php5
   Suggests: 
   Installed-Size: 
   Maintainer: Nicolas Favre-Felix [n.favre-felix@owlient.eu]
   Conflicts: 
   Replaces: 
   Provides: phpredis
   Description: Redis C extension for PHP5.
   

7. Okay, now you can build again and get a package as you expected with this command!

   % dpkg -b debian phpredis-`uname -m`.deb
   

8. Finally you get debian package named like this:

   phpredis-x86_64.deb

Hopes this helps.