Abstract The Swift Deep Galactic Plane Survey (DGPS) is a Swift Key Project consisting of 380 tiled pointings covering ∼40 deg² of the Galactic plane between longitude 10 < ∣l∣ < 30 deg and latitude ∣b∣ < 0.5 deg. Each pointing has a 5 ks exposure, yielding a total of 1.9 Ms spread across the entire survey footprint. Phase I observations were carried out between 2017 March and 2021 May. The survey is complete to depth L _X > 10³⁴ erg s⁻¹ to the edge of the Galaxy. The main survey goal is to produce a rich sample of new X-ray sources and transients, while also covering a broad discovery space. Here, we introduce the survey strategy and present a catalog of sources detected during Phase I observations. In total, we identify 928 X-ray sources, of which 348 are unique to our X-ray catalog. We report on the characteristics of sources in our catalog and highlight sources newly classified and published by the DGPS team.