How can I add a manually installed app to apt so that it can be updated via apt?

Windows admin here who recently inherited a bunch of Ubuntu 20.04.6 LTS systems that are probably poorly configured.

I need to update loader-utils, firebase, json5, and minimist.

The patching guide handed down to me uses apt for all patching, although we do have NextCloud enterprise installed as well, which has its own patching mechanism.

Fully updating NextCloud and patching via apt doesn't seem to touch these apps.

I am looking to understand the best way to address this and if there's any way to make apt aware of these applications, so they can be updated via apt along with everything else.

Thanks

So, there isn't really a way to tell APT to just take responsibility over installed software and figure out where and how to get updates for it, but you can often find APT repositories available for things that have been manually installed.

Sometimes there are "PPAs", "Personal Package Archives", that some community members use to publish their builds. Sometimes the packages have been added to the official repositories that are not enabled by default, e.g. universe or multiverse. Sometimes the software authors themselves publish repositories for their software.

Generally the easiest way to go about finding any of these is just googling ubuntu "20.04" "software-name" (replace version with the relevant one for you), and you will quite likely bump into a decent guide for how to install it.

If you have an old version of the software installed manually, it may be a good idea to remove the old version before doing that. If it was installed from a .deb file it may be done with dpkg (check with dpkg --get-selections | grep -i name): sudo dpkg --remove name

If installed from source, the source folder is often left present in the system by people who installed it in the past. With some luck there's a Makefile and an uninstall target which you may be able to run with make uninstall or sudo make uninstall. When in doubt, try to check online for the specific software how it may have been installed and check your options accordingly.

It does seem however like loader-utils, firebase, json5, and minimalist may be NPM packages for a Node.js application? In that case there almost never is a real need to manage them via APT, you typically do that with NPM, Yarn, or PNPM - package managers for the Node.js ecosystem. If you need to update them, for the vast majority of Node applications you would run e.g. npm update loader-utils in the folder with your application's package.json -file. If this is the case, you should probably check how that application was installed, and if you can just get an update to it with all the updates done already, as sometimes updating libraries requires updating the code to work with it.

Hopefully needless to say, but do take backups before you mess like this with an unknown system that you rely on.