How to install Debian packages on Alpine?

Question

For example:

wget https://dl.influxdata.com/influxdb/releases/influxdb_0.13.0_armhf.deb
sudo dpkg -i influxdb_0.13.0_armhf.deb

score 34 · Answer 1 · edited Oct 21 '20 at 12:05

34

Good news:

alpine now has dpkg package available in its repository and you can install it by apk add dpkg and you can use dpkg -i *.deb to install the deb you want.

edited Oct 21 '20 at 12:05

Himanshu

3
5

answered May 29 '19 at 15:18

JiaHao Xu

2,452
16
31

`/bin/sh: dpkg: not found` --- am I missing something? – csomakk Nov 27 '19 at 14:08
4

Did you install `dpkg` use `apk add dpkg`? – JiaHao Xu Dec 05 '19 at 09:04
1

dpkg: error: failed to open package info file '/var/lib/dpkg/status' for reading: No such file or directory How to create the status file on alpine? – Juan Rojas Sep 08 '20 at 17:28
It seems to be a plain text file, maybe just `touch` that file and see how it goes? – JiaHao Xu Sep 09 '20 at 09:22
1

better answer: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/594431/391534 – user894319twitter Feb 07 '21 at 03:38

score 5 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 10 '16 at 00:51

5

Alpine Linux is not a Debian derivate (luckily), so it does not support Debian packages.

Alpine doesn't provide a package for influxdb (yet), so you can create one or install influxdb from sources.

answered Jun 10 '16 at 00:51

Jakub Jirutka

10,269
4
42
35

26

Why is that a good thing that Alpine is not compatible with Debian? This makes life hard for people who want to switch. – Mahdi Sep 06 '17 at 10:12
11

well it's a completely different linux distribution so why would you expect it in any way to be compatible with debian packages? how often do you see kangaroos mating with whales? – Jun 01 '18 at 13:45
6

That is not a strange expectation. There are plenty of distributions that use common package managers. For example, Ubuntu and Kali use Debian packages. RPMs are used by Red Hat (obviously), SUSE, and Mandriva linux distributions. – Sevak Avakians Feb 04 '19 at 19:46
3

Alpine's theme is: "Small. Simple. Secure.". Adding deb support would conflict with it. There are plenty of alternatives for Alpine. If space is not an issue, why not simply use a ubuntu server image? – mace May 22 '19 at 16:20
@mace for me it's centralization and latest versions, The way alpine structure APKs are so good as making blender latest down to 77.51 installed size due to **separation** of dependancies, that ones could be used by other packages olso, so that allow for less proccess replication and more of hardware effetiency for large scale setup also, but it still lake many packages – Abd-Elaziz Sharaf Aug 12 '23 at 17:17

How to install Debian packages on Alpine?

2 Answers2