Extracting from a .deb file

This guide which teach you how to install custom software by extracting it from a .deb file. A .deb file is an archive that contains folders and files using a standard directory structure. We can extract its contents and use the files.

The guide assumes you can run commands via SSH. There is a separate guide on how to connect to your slot via SSH. Commands are kept as simple as possible and in most cases will simply need to be copied and pasted into the terminal window (then executed by pressing the Enter key).

Table of contents

You should also consider reading the general information on installing custom software as background to this, though you might find it isn't necessary to install your desired piece of software.

Pre-requisites

The first thing to do is to create the ~/bin directory and reload the relevant files for the PATH setting to take effect using this command:

mkdir -p ~/bin && bash

If the directory already exists you will not delete its contents by recreating it using the command above, so there's no need to worry about that.

Getting and extracting

The most obvious thing you need to then do is actually get the .deb file your slot. You can do that by editing the command below, which uses variables.

wget -qO software.deb https://somesite.com/software.deb
dpkg -x ~/software.deb ~/software
cp -rf ~/software/usr/bin* ~/bin/
rm -rf ~/software