## The Personal Builder: pbuilder

Using pbuilder as a package builder allows you to build the package from within a chroot environment. You can build binary packages without using pbuilder, but you must have all the build dependencies installed on your system first. However, pbuilder allows the packager to check the build dependencies because the package is built within a minimal Ubuntu installation, and the build dependencies are downloaded according to the `debian/control` file.

The following is a brief guide to installing, using, and updating a pbuilder environment, however, there are many details of pbuilder usage that are outside the realm of this guide. The pbuilder man page has lots of information and should be consulted if you have problems or need more detailed information.

### Installare e configurare l'ambiente pbuilder

The first, and perhaps most obvious, thing to do is to install pbuilder. If you want to create a pbuilder for a release newer than the one you currently have installed, you will need to manually install the debootstrap .deb (from packages.ubuntu.com) from the newer release. To create a pbuilder execute:

    sudo pbuilder create --distribution <distro> \
    	--othermirror "deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu <distro> universe multiverse"

where <distro> is the release you want (edgy for instance) to create the pbuilder for. If you would like to create more than one pbuilder environment you can append the --basetgz flag with the desired location for the compressed pbuilder environment. The default is `/var/cache/pbuilder/base.tgz`. If you do choose to use --basetgz you will need to use it with the other pbuilder commands so pbuilder knows which compressed build environment to use.

Creating a pbuilder environment will take some time as debootstrap essentially downloads a minimal Ubuntu installation.

### Utilizzo di pbuilder

Now that you have a running pbuilder you can build binary packages from the source package by invoking:

    sudo pbuilder build *.dsc

This will build all the source packages in the current directory. The resulting .debs and source packages can be found in `/var/cache/pbuilder/result/` (which can be changed with the --buildresult flag).

### Updating the pbuilder

You should always have a current pbuilder whenever you are testing your source packages, especially when you are building for a development release that is rapidly changing, to ensure that the dependencies are properly found. To update your pbuilder, use:

    sudo pbuilder update

If you would like to upgrade you pbuilder to a new release you can use pbuilder update in combination with the --distribution flag:

    sudo pbuilder update --distribution <newdistro> --override-config

Binary and Source Packages |  | Capitolo 3. Basic Packaging