In order to build a &debian; package from the &git; repository you use: &git-buildpackage;. This builds the upstream tarball as will be described below and invokes &debuild; to build the package. To use another build command you can use the --git-builder option as described later in the manual but &debuild; is nice since it can invoke lintian. During the development phase (when you're either not on the debian-branch or when you have uncommitted changes in your repository) you'll usually use: &git-buildpackage; --git-ignore-new If &git-buildpackage; doesn't find a valid upstream tarball it will create one by looking at the tag matching the upstream version, if no tag can be found it uses the tip of the current upstream-branch. Any other treeish object to create the upstream tarball from can be given with the --upstream-branch option. Once you're satisfied with the build and want to do a release you commit all your changes and issue: &git-buildpackage; --git-tag This will again build the debian package and tag the final result after extracting the current version from the changelog. If you want &gpg; signed tags you can use the --git-sign and --git-keyid options. To save typing these option can be specified via the configuration files. You can futhermore change the tag format used when creating tags with the debian-tag option, the default is debian/<version>. Tools like &svn-buildpackage; use a separate build-area. To achieve a similar behaviour with &git-buildpackage; use the --git-export-dir option: &git-buildpackage; --git-export-dir=../build-area/ This will export the head of the ecurrent branch to ../build-area/package-version, build the package. If you don't want to export the current branch head you can use --git-export to export any treeish object, here are some examples: &git-buildpackage; --git-export-dir=../build-area --git-export=debian/0.4.3 &git-buildpackage; --git-export-dir=../build-area --git-export=etch &git-buildpackage; --git-export-dir=../build-area --git-export=8caed309653d69b7ab440e3d35abc090eb4c6697 &git-buildpackage; --git-export-dir=../build-area --git-export=INDEX The special argument INDEX exports the state of the current index which can be used to include staged but uncommitted changes in the build. If you want to default to build in a separate build area you can specify the directory to use in the gbp.conf. [git-buildpackage] # use a build area relative to the git repository export-dir=../build-area # to use the same build area for all packages use an absolute path: #export-dir=/home/debian-packages/build-area &git-buildpackage; will cleanup the build-area after a successful build. If you want to keep the build tree use --git-dont-purge. If you want to push your changes automatically after a succesful build and tag you can use &git-buildpackage;'s posttag hook. A very simple invocation would look like this: git-buildpackage --git-tag --git-posttag="git push && git push --tags" This assumes you have set up a remote repository to push to in .git/config. Usually you want to make sure you don't push out any unrelated changes into the remote repository. This is handled by the following hook which only pushes out the created tag to where you pulled from and also forwards the corresponding remote branch to that position: #!/bin/sh -e # # gbp-push: post tag hook to push out the newly created tag and to forward the # remote branch to that position if ! REMOTE=$(git config --get branch."${GBP_BRANCH}".remote); then REMOTE=origin fi if [ "$GBP_TAG" ]; then echo "Pushing $GBP_TAG to $REMOTE" git push "$REMOTE" "$GBP_TAG" else echo "GBP_TAG not set." exit 1 fi if [ "$GBP_SHA1" ] && [ "$GBP_BRANCH" ]; then git push "$REMOTE" "$GBP_SHA1":"$GBP_BRANCH" else echo "GBP_SHA1 or GBP_BRANCH not set." exit 1 fi echo "done." GBP_TAG, GBP_SHA1 and GBP_BRANCH are passed to the hook via the environment. To call this hook automatically upon tag creation add: posttag="gbp-push" to your .gbp.conf and make sure gbp-push is somewhere in your $PATH.