Features:

• Automatically move debian packages in to your apt repository based on gemspec-esque version specifications.

• Use as part of an automated build and deployment system (i.e. continuous deployment) to get your debs in to your apt site

• Control and query using a jabber bot

Requirements:

• reprepro based apt site
• directory full of builds - the build archive
• ruby1.9 and rubygems
• jabber server (optional, for notifications and bot)

gem install apt-control-{some-version}.gem

Set up a control.ini file, which lists your repositories and the packages you want to control, along with gemspec style version rules.

# control.ini
[production]
rest-api    = "~> 0.1"
mailer      = "= 1.4.2"

[staging]
rest-api    = ">= 0.1"
mailer      = "= 1.4"

Presuming you already have a directory full of builds and a reprepro apt repository. Now you can get a dump of the state of your repository and build archive, which will confirm you've got everything set up properly.

NB: You can set up a config file to avoid passing -o options with each invocation

$ apt_control -o control_file=control.ini -o build_archive_dir=builds \
  -o apt_site_dir=apt status

production
  rest-api
    rule        - ~> 0.1
    included    - 0.1.0
    available   - 0.1.0, 0.1.1, 0.2.0
    satisfied   - true
    includeable - true
... # And so on

There is more documentation included in the CLI. Run apt_control -h to get more help.

apt_control comes with a watch command that will watch your build directory for new packages to arrive, and your control file for any changes made to it. It will then perform any include operations that it can according to any new builds or changed rules.

The watch daemon can connect to your jabber server, where you can communicate with the bot and get it to do stuff, like reload the control file, ask for the status.

The bot commands mostly correspond to the cli commands.

The include operation will include the highest possible package for each package rule that you have set up in your apt repository.

• CLI: apt_control include
• aptbot: aptbot: include

Set will set a rule for a particular package, for instance, set the rule for the api package in production to be '~> 1.4.1'

• CLI: apt_control set production api '~> 1.4.1'
• aptbot: aptbot: set production api '~> 1.4.1'

The promote rule is a fancy set that takes the currently included package from one repository and updates your package rule for the destination repository to want to include exactly that package. This is mostly useful for moving a package from staging in to production.

• CLI: apt_control promote staging production api
• aptbot: aptbot: promote staging production api