Note! This is an improvement over the packaging in  Installing apache karaf on debian stretch, this package is packaged using native debian packaging tools instead of fpm, and is built from the karaf source tarball instead of the karaf binary tarball.

Apache karaf is an OSGi container and application server that is provisioned from maven, and has an ssh server. Basically it is possible to start an empty karaf, ssh in and give some commands to install an application using maven.

There still isn’t a native .deb package on maven (see  the RFP (Request For Packaging) bug for karaf in the debian bug tracker), but this package can be installed from my own maven repository.

The packacing projecct can be found on github: https://github.com/steinarb/karaf-debian

Procedure to build the package

1. Install the required build tools

   apt-get update
   apt-get install openjdk-sdk git maven-debian-helper devscripts

2. Clone the karaf package repository

   mkdir -p ~/git
   cd ~/git/
   git clone https://github.com/steinarb/karaf-debian.git

3. Build the package

   cd ~/git/karaf-debian/
   dpkg-buildpackage

After this, there will be a karaf-*.deb package in the directory above the karaf-debian directory.