The Debian package of propellor ships its full source code because propellor is configured by rebuilding it, and embraces modification of any of the source code. /usr/bin/propellor is a wrapper which will set up a propellor git repository in ~/.propellor/, and run ~/.propellor/propellor if it exists. Edit ~/.propellor/config.hs to configure it. Note that upgrading the propellor package will not update your ~/.propellor/ repository. This is because you may have local changes to the source, or may need to adapt your config.hs to work with the new version of propellor. Instead, if your ~/.propellor/ is from an older version of propellor, /usr/bin/propellor will warn that it's out of date. You can `git pull upstream` in your repository to update to the current upstream source, as distributed in the Debian package. In older versions of propellor, the upstream remote was pointed at the repository on github, so you may want to change it to point to the repository included in the Debian package: git config remote.upstream.url /usr/src/propellor/propellor.git