Tasksel – A Group Package Installation Tool for Debian

Tasksel is a tool for Debian based systems to install multiple related packages as a co-ordinated “task” onto your system. This provides an easy way to setup your server for the specific purpose. For example, you need to setup your server as LAMP based web hosting server. Therefore you can simply tell tasksel to install lamp-server. Similarly, you can use dns-server to install complete dns server on your system.

Install Tasksel

First of all, You need to install tasksel package on your system, which is available under default package repositories for Debian systems. You can install it using apt-get simply.

$ sudp apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install tasksel

Installing Packages with Tasksel

Let’s start using tasksel command. Go to command prompt type tasksel with sudo and press enter. This will list software package collections. Choose appropriate package collection and press Ok to install.

$ sudo tasksel

Also, you can directly specify the package name. This will work same as above without asking for selection.

$ sudo tasksel install lamp-server       # Install LAMP Server 
$ sudo tasksel install openssh-server    # Install Openssh Server 
$ sudo tasksel install mail-server       # Install Mail Server 

List Packages with Tasksel

Use --list-task option to find out the list of packages collection available with tasksel. You will get a long list of packages group. Here are some quickly uses package groups.

$ sudo tasksel --list-task 

...
u dns-server    DNS server
u kubuntu-desktop       Kubuntu desktop
i lamp-server   LAMP server
u mail-server   Mail server
u postgresql-server     PostgreSQL database
u samba-server  Samba file server
u tomcat-server Tomcat Java server
u ubuntu-desktop        Ubuntu desktop
i openssh-server        OpenSSH server
...

Visit here to read more about tasksel utility on Debian system.