If you use the standard debhelper toolchain instead, you get lots of stuff for free.<p>Want to ship a systemd service file? include &quot;--with systemd&quot; in the dh invocation in debian&#x2F;rules (and add dh-systemd as a build dependency), and you can drop your system files in debian&#x2F;yourpackage.service. The helper will do all the work for you like copying the service file to the right location, doing the &quot;daemon-reload&quot; to make sure it is read after it&#x27;s changed, reload it after package installation, stop if when the package is uninstalled, and so on.<p>Want to create an empty directory? add it to debian&#x2F;dirs. Want to install additional files? add them to debian&#x2F;install.<p>Want to create a debian package from an existing perl module? &quot;dh-make-perl --cpan The::Package&quot;.<p>And the nice thing is that all of these mechanisms are composable, and it is easy to override steps you want to customize.<p>At first, I found the standard debhelper toolchain to be complex too, but it actually makes simple things easy, and hard things possible.<p>Shameless plug: Yesterday I&#x27;ve blogged about debian packaging a simplistic Perl web application: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;perlgeek.de&#x2F;blog-en&#x2F;automating-deployments&#x2F;2016-005-example-project.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;perlgeek.de&#x2F;blog-en&#x2F;automating-deployments&#x2F;2016-005-e...</a> (not much Perl specific in there).