CKAN Packaging Scripts

These scripts are used to build Debian packages (deb files) for CKAN releases.

[!WARNING] These scripts are used by CKAN maintainers. If you want to install CKAN, including via Debian package, check the installation documentation

[!NOTE] As of December 2024, Docker is used as a building environment to create the deb packages. The previous Ansible / Vagrant setup is no longer used

Overview

To create Debian packages of CKAN, use the ckan-package executable:

/ckan-package --help
usage: ckan-package [-h] [-i ITERATION] ref target

Builds CKAN deb packages. This script essentially sets up the necessary vars and calls `docker buildx build`.

positional arguments:
  ref                   The CKAN branch or tag to build (e.g. master, dev-v2.11, ckan-2.10.6...)
  target                The Ubuntu version to target (e.g. 20.04, 22.04, 24.04...)

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -i ITERATION, --iteration ITERATION
                        The iteration number to add to the package name.

For instance:

./ckan-package ckan-2.11.1 24.04
./ckan-package dev-v2.11 22.04
./ckan-package master 24.04

The currently supported packages are:

CKAN version	Ubuntu version
2.10	20.04 (focal)
2.10	22.04 (jammy)
2.11	22.04 (jammy)
2.11	24.04 (noble)

Any other combination is not officially supported, although you might be able to build it tweaking the parameters above.

How it works

Under the hood, the ckan-package command just calls docker buildx build. You can call it directly using the appropiate build arguments:

docker buildx build \
	--output type=local,dest=.  \
	--build-arg CKAN_REF=ckan-2.11.0 \
	--build-arg UBUNTU_VERSION=24.04 \
	.

Release process

There are two separate workflows:

• build.yml builds the deb packages (based on the versions supplied in VERSIONS.json) and stores them as artifacfts in the workflow run page. This is triggered on every push.

• Additionally, when a tag is pushed, publish.yml also builds the packages and:

  1. Uploads them to the S3 bucket powering https://packaging.ckan.org
  2. Creates a new GitHub release with the packages attached as assets.

With this, the suggested release process is the following:

• Whenever there is a new CKAN release in the works, or fixes need to be applied to the packages, a new branch and pull request is created. This will trigger the workflows that will create the packages for that version of the code. The ckan_ref should be the relvant development branch (e.g. dev-v2.11).
• The packages can be downloded from the workflow page to test locally. Once everthing looks fine the PR is merged.
• A new tag in the form vYYYYMMDD is pushed to trigger the publication of the packages and the creation of the release.