Feature Request: Ability to deploy .debs from an offline folder instead of from online repositories

[r-colvin]

I have a cross compiled application that is not available in any of the upstream repositories which I require to include in my image. It would be greatly beneficial if this could be achieved within SDM.

Although I am cross-compiling my application, the use case also comes up when you want to install newer versions of applications than those that are available in the upstream repos. Many applications for Raspberry Pi lag behind and this is a way to resolve this.

I build all my images offline and though I can run a local repo, it would be much easier to just apt install from local debs.

This functionality can be seen in the rpi-image-gen debstore example (https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-image-gen/tree/master/examples/debstore) which inspired this feature request.

This feature as originally discussed in this Raspberry Pi Forum Post: https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?p=2363582#p2363582 including here for tracking purposes

[gitbls]

To be clear, my understanding is that you're requesting the ability to say something like:

apt-install-debs:debs=pkg1.deb,pkg2.deb
apt-install-debs:debs=@list-of-debs

And each package would be installed with apt install pkg1.deb
Is that it in a nutshell?

[r-colvin]

I think so?!! as mentioned elsewhere the internals of apt are not my strong suit. But in my rpi-image-gen script now, i just do

apt install -y /tmp/debs/*.deb

the debs for the application and it's dependencies are in that folder and apt just, magically, takes care it!

[gitbls]

I'm looking at this, and the first thing we need to discuss is the scale of this. Because of the way sdm works, all the stuff that you ask it to configure must be available inside the IMG during Phase 1.

Apps that have this requirement copy everything into the IMG during Phase 0.

What is the total size of the debs you want to do this with?

[r-colvin]

that is a very good question - from memory the number of debs I had was large and added significant size to the image rpi-image-gen generated. For the three applications - there are 100K, 60K and 137M respectively

if that is too large, then perhaps the solution is a local repo on the build server...

[gitbls]

"Too large" is something YOU would have to determine. It's fine from the sdm perspective, but it's a question of whether you mind waiting for the 137MB of stuff to get copied into the IMG.

There are other ways to accomplish this. If you don't need any of these apps when the system first boots, you could trigger a script via sdm that installs them over the network once the system has fully booted, using the new defer-plugin. This will require the next release (coming soon) that enables you to defer running an arbitrary command.

Alternatively, if you want to install them during customization, you could copy them over the network via scp, or install the nfs-common package during customization so that you could access them via nfs (yes, during the customization).

Since there are some good alternatives I'm inclined to defer adding a specific feature to sdm for this, especially since it has "rough edges" needing documentation: how large the debs are, etc.

Happy to help you sort out the best way to do this in your environment, of course.

[r-colvin]

cheers, let me take a look/think and see what I can do and come back to close this issue