Creating a DEB package for Oracle Java

Linux based operating systems comes by default with Open JDK installations. Often it is necessary for various developmental needs to install the Oracle Java. Oracle only supplies two installations of Java for Linux based operating systems – a rpm and a tar.gz binary distribution.

For RPM based distributions it is fairly easy to have the uniform setup on a large farm of servers, but on DEB based distributions a lot of manual work needs to be done at each host after unpacking the tar.gz file such as updating the alternatives etc to make the Oracle Java a default Java installation.

I have been thinking about how to deploy Oracle Java SDK on multiple Debian servers in a standardized way i.e by creating a DEB file.

A search on Debian Packages revealed the existence of a tool called – “make-jpkg”, a part of “java-package” package. This tool is capable of creating a DEB package from this tar.gz file. Here is how I created the package –

$ sudo apt-get install fakeroot java-package

I downloaded the Oracle Java Standard Edition  on my Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) virtual machine.

Next I ran the command –

$ fakeroot make-jpkg --full-name "Ajitabh Pandey" --email "ajitabh@unixclinic.com" /home/ajitabhp/Downloads/jdk-7u25-linux-x64.tar.gz

I got an error stating “No Matching Plugin was found”

Just above this error message the plugin path was given for various plugins used by this utility – “make-jpkg”. The plugins were in /usr/share/java-package directory in the form of “.sh” files (shell scripts). I next opened each shell script to try and decipher them and found the possible problem in the plugins “/usr/share/java-package/oracle-j2*.sh”. The following pattern picked up from “/usr/share/java-package/oracle-j2sdk.sh” was the culprit –

"jdk-7u"[0-9]"-linux-x64.tar.gz") # SUPPORTED
j2se_version=1.7.0+update${archive_name:6:1}${revision}
j2se_expected_min_size=180 #Mb
j2se_priority=317
found=true
;;

If you see this pattern, it clearly indicates that it is only supporting up to update 9 of the JDK and the JDK I downloaded was update 25. So I added the following lines just below the above lines to add the support for my version.

"jdk-7u"[0-9][0-9]"-linux-x64.tar.gz") # SUPPORTED
j2se_version=1.7.0+update${archive_name:6:2}${revision}
j2se_expected_min_size=180 #Mb
j2se_priority=317
found=true
;;

There are two differences, one in first line and the second in second line. I am sure you will be able to spot them and decipher them.

After making similar changes in the other oracle* files I ran the make-jpkg as mentioned above and it created a DEB file – oracle-j2sdk1.7_1.7.0+update25_amd64.deb, which is deploy-able with the usual “dpkg -i”.

Changing the Default Java Installation to the Oracle Installation

After installing the package, you may want to change some alternatives in order to make the Oracle JDK and associated JRE installations as defaults. As the default version of Java may be something different. You can check the current version of java and its provider by –

$ java -version
java version "1.6.0_24"
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (IcedTea6 1.11.5) (6b24-1.11.5-1)
OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (build 20.0-b12, mixed mode)
$ file `which java`
/usr/bin/java: symbolic link to `/etc/alternatives/java'
$ ls -l /etc/alternatives/java
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 46 Aug 16 20:18 /etc/alternatives/java -> /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk-amd64/jre/bin/java


First find out the name of the available installations –

$ /usr/sbin/update-java-alternatives -l
j2sdk1.7-oracle 317 /usr/lib/jvm/j2sdk1.7-oracle
java-1.6.0-openjdk-amd64 1061 /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.6.0-openjdk-amd64


We will switch our default Java to “j2sdk1.7-oracle” with the following command –

$ sudo /usr/sbin/update-java-alternatives -s j2sdk1.7-oracle

Now you can check your Java version by

$ java -version
java version "1.7.0_25"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.7.0_25-b15)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 23.25-b01, mixed mode)
$ file `which java`
/usr/bin/java: symbolic link to `/etc/alternatives/java'
$ ls -l /etc/alternatives/java
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 41 Aug 16 20:22 /etc/alternatives/java -> /usr/lib/jvm/j2sdk1.7-oracle/jre/bin/java