apt repository for Discord

3 Sep 2023

Debian  git  Web 

I spend quite a lot of time on Discord these days, mostly as it's been a really good way to talk to/with a community that wants to vaguely keep track of multiple threads of conversation. It's how most of my "pen and paper" RPG time gets organised as well.

Now, I'm running this mostly on Debian Linux, and although I'm really glad they've got a native app for it and are happily distributing .deb files for it, I keep getting vaguely annoyed that I have to download and manually install that again rather than it just coming in on an apt repo. I mean, the hard part is making the .deb, not the repo right? Except there's been an open request for the last 5 years for this and it wasn't looking like they were getting anywhere close.

TL;DR - I built it. Install steps are pretty simple:

1. Create a file /etc/apt/sources.list.d/discord.list with the contents deb https://palfrey.github.io/discord-apt/debian/ ./
2. Download the file discord-apt.gpg.asc to /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d
3. sudo apt-get update
4. sudo apt-get install discord

Now, under the hood, it works via two things:

• Various of the Debian command line tools for this - mostly dpkg-scanpackages and apt-ftparchive, which despite the name generates Release files that are fairly protocol agnostic
• A little bit of Python hackery to download new packages when their redirect from the generic location tells us so, combined with a Github action to automagically add/release these onto a Pages setup

It's not massively complicated, but it wasn't until I saw weekly-box86-debs the other week that I realised this was really quite simple, and something I should just do.

Previously: Migrating from PostgreSQL to CockroachDB Next: serial_test - 3.0.0, multi-key support