After more than a few requests for wayfire deb packages that work on ubuntu, I decided to try creating some. The result is a success. This is how I did it.

First, I started with the latest code. I will cover wayland and wayfire packages. There are others that are required, but these two are different in that wayland packages are already in ubuntu but there are none for wayfire.

For wayland, we will copy the debian directory, containing the interesting files for building a package from upstream, and place it in the upstream code directory.

$ git clone https://git.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/wayland wayland-ubuntu
$ git clone https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland wayland-upstream
$ cp -r wayland-ubuntu/debian wayland-upstream

Next, we want to prepare the environment by installing the build dependencies.

$ sudo apt-get build-dep wayland
$ sudo apt install gcc g++ meson ninja debhelper dh-make

Finally we want to configure and build the packages.

$ dh_auto_configure --buildsystem=meson
$ dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -us -uc -b

This results in the following packages:

libwayland-bin_1.19.90-1_amd64.deb
libwayland-client0_1.19.90-1_amd64.deb
libwayland-cursor0_1.19.90-1_amd64.deb
libwayland-dev_1.19.90-1_amd64.deb
libwayland-egl1_1.19.90-1_amd64.deb
libwayland-egl-backend-dev_1.19.90-1_amd64.deb
libwayland-server0_1.19.90-1_amd64.deb

For wayfire, the process is similar but we need to generate the debian files. Install dependencies manually, by satisfying meson first.

$ git clone https://github.com/WayfireWM/wayfire && cd wayfire
$ dh_make --createorig -p wayfire_0.8.0
$ dh_auto_configure --buildsystem=meson
$ dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -us -uc -b
$ ls ../*.deb
../wayfire_0.8.0-1_amd64.deb

Here is a PPA containing all the packages needed for wayfire on Ubuntu >=20.04. To install wayfire:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:soreau/wayfirewm
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt install wayfire wayfire-plugins-extra wf-shell wcm xwayland

Launch wayfire by running it from X or tty, or simply logout and select the Wayfire session.
To remove completely:

$ sudo apt install ppa-purge
$ sudo ppa-purge ppa:soreau/wayfirewm