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How do I export a list of installed Debian packages on a system, and then install those same packages on a new system?

jes5199
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5 Answers5

19

To backup:

sudo dpkg --get-selections > /tmp/dpkglist.txt

To Restore:

sudo dpkg --set-selections < /tmp/dpkglist.txt
sudo apt-get -y update
sudo apt-get dselect-upgrade

Also see this question for additional options and info: Ubuntu, how to setup a new machine like an existing one

I have the above running in a daily cronjob that checks the dpgklist into SVN as part of our server inventory. This will allow you to keep a reasonable accurate inventory of installed packages across your servers and its easy to do a quick side-by-side diff to see if a server is missing a particular package.

Community
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faultyserver
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13

aptitude also satisfies this usecase, and it preserves information about "automatically installed" packages that other methods do not. Run the following on the reference machine:

aptitude search -F '%p' '~i!~M' > package_list

Copy package_list to the other machine and run

xargs aptitude --schedule-only install < package_list; aptitude install;
TomRoche
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Vihang D
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0

In recent versions of Debian/Ubuntu/Mint, dpkg needs available packages to be in its "avail" database for dpkg --set-selections to work.

Example sequence:

  1. (On other system) dpkg --get-selections > installed.dselect
  2. sudo apt update
  3. apt-cache dumpavail | sudo dpkg --merge-avail
  4. sudo dpkg --set-selections < installed.dselect
  5. sudo apt-get dselect-upgrade

The third command populates dpkg's "avail" database. It's important to run this before setting the selections of which additional packages to install.

This reqires dpkg v1.17.7 and later. See Q: Why does ''dpkg --set-selections'' not record selections for unknown packages? on the Debian wiki for more details.

Alastair Irvine
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0

That's a good idea, and you might also set up one server with apt-proxy if you make a habit of this.

0

faultyservers answer worked for me only after running a different command as per http://rayslinux.blogspot.de/2012/10/ubuntu-1210-dpkg-warning-package-not-in.html

sudo apt-get install dselect sudo dselect access sudo dselect update

Before that running

sudo apt-get dselect-upgrade

only returned

[...]
dpkg: warning: package not in database at line 302: xfonts-utils
dpkg: warning: found unknown packages; this might mean the available database is outdated, and needs to be updated through a frontend method
pi@FHEM-new:/tmp $ sudo apt-get dselect-upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

I was trying to install the same packages from my old Raspberry Pi (running Raspbian GNU/Linux 7 (wheezy)) on my new Raspberry (Raspbian GNU/Linux 8 (jessie)).

adiuva
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