How to download the source packages for all installed packages?

Question

What apt incantations do I need to use to download the source packages for all the installed packages into a directory? (The use case is GPL compliance when giving an installed Ubuntu system to another person along with a computer.)

Answer 1

Try this..

Create a directory where you want the source for all installed packages to be downloaded, and enter it.

mkdir source; cd source

Create a file named getsource.sh

getsource.sh

#!/bin/bash
dpkg --get-selections | while read line
do
        package=`echo $line | awk '{print $1}'`
        mkdir $package
        cd $package
        apt-get -q source $package
        cd ..
done

Make it executable.

chmod a+x getsource.sh

Execute it..

./getsource.sh

And go grab a cup of coffee :)

Answer 2

An alternative for you might be to just hand out the source CDs:

• http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/11.10/release/source/

Answer 3

There's a couple issues in the accepted answer and with the linked better answer in Unix Stack Exchange. Here's an improved and tested script with comments:

#!/bin/bash

# ${Source} doesn't always show the source package name, ${source:Package} does.
# Multiple packages can have the same source, sort -u eliminates duplicates.
dpkg-query -f '${source:Package}\n' -W | sort -u | while read p; do
    mkdir -p $p
    pushd $p

    # -qq very quiet, pushd provides cleaner progress.
    # -d download compressed sources only, do not extract.
    apt-get -qq -d source $p

    popd
done

Run as non-root user (_apt works). Note any errors as they may indicate packages with no sources available. You may want to run the script with 2>err.log to parse these manually later.

Answer 4

On Ubuntu refer to command:

apt-get source package-name

it is recommended that you only use apt-get source as a regular user, because then you can edit files in the source package without needing root privileges.