About Flatpak

Flatpak is a packing method available on Linux and provides a separate sandbox environment from the main OS like chroot or a docker container.

The Manifest file

Flatpak on Manifests

The manifest is an .yml with a set of instructions to tell the flatpak-builder cli tool how to build the flatpak from the modules in the yml.

The manifest got an header, a body and definitions of modules.

Even the core application it self is a module inside the flatpak that needs to be defined.

RetroDECK: net.retrodeck.retrodeck.yml

RetroDECK flatpak's name is net.retrodeck.retrodeck and it's defined in the manifest file.

net.retrodeck.retrodeck.yml in our manifest the RetroDECK module is defined together with a ever growing list of other modules like our dependencies:

Emulators
Game Engines
Libraries
Github / Gitlab projects

Are all defined in their own module and built together.

The /app folder

The flatpak application is located and built inside the /app folder within this environment.

The real location of the /app folder in the hostOS is in the none writable path: /var/lib/flatpak/app/

In RetroDECK's case it is /var/lib/flatpak/app/net.retrodeck.retrodeck/

Writable folders

These folder are the only folders writable by a flatpak.

/var/data is linked to ~/.var/app/<FLATPAKNAME>/data
/var/config is linked to ~/.var/app/<FLATPAKNAME>/config

For RetroDECK:

~/.var/app/net.retrodeck.retrodeck/

~/.var/app/net.retrodeck.retrodeck/config/

~/app/net.retrodeck.retrodeck/data/

The Appdata file

To be published on Flathub a appdata .xml file is needed that contains all the information for the store:

Official name
Website links
Screenshots links
Version
Patchnotes
Etc...

RetroDECK: net.retrodeck.retrodeck.appdata.xml

net.retrodeck.retrodeck.appdata.xml on our GitHub repository's root.

Permissions

Additional permissions arguments can be defined in the manifest to give access to several features of the hostsystem. Flatpak developers are always adding new permissions but the goal of a flatpak it should only request as much as it needs and not be over permissive .

Example Modules

A good way to learn how to write modules is to search on flathub's GitHub for other modules to get an idea, however our manifest is more or less using every module type possible. What follows are two examples (note that providing a sha256 is mandatory):

Example of rclone module

  - name: rclone
    buildsystem: simple
    build-commands:
      - cp rclone ${FLATPAK_DEST}/bin/
    sources:
      - type: archive
        url: https://github.com/rclone/rclone/releases/download/v1.61.1/rclone-v1.61.1-linux-amd64.zip
        sha256: 6d6455e1cb69eb0615a52cc046a296395e44d50c0f32627ba8590c677ddf50a9

What does this module do?

Downloads the file from the defined url
Extracts it automatically as it's defined as a archive
Executing the build-commands (a copy in this case).

Example of a cmake-ninja module

  - name: glslang
    buildsystem: cmake-ninja
    config-opts:
      - -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
      - -DENABLE_CTEST=OFF
      - -DENABLE_OPT=OFF
    cleanup:
      - /include
      - /lib/cmake
    sources:
      - type: archive
        url: https://github.com/KhronosGroup/glslang/archive/13.1.1.tar.gz
        sha256: 1c4d0a5a38c8aaf89a2d7e6093be734320599f5a6775b2726beeb05b0c054e66