Flatpak Packaging

[Jummit]

Share your bug report, feature request, or comment.

I think it would be nice to provide a Flatpak package as an alternative installation method.

For reference, I found Jellyfin very easy to set up: https://flathub.org/apps/org.jellyfin.JellyfinServer

[github-actions]

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[gabek]

If anybody who has experience with Flatpak sees this, and would be interested in helping, please chime in. It's unlikely I'm going to dig into the ecosystem of Flatpak anytime soon, simply because I rarely use it myself. But I'm not opposed to adding it to our deployment methods, as long as packaging or it on our side is a low lift, and can be automated.

[varungujarathi9]

Hey @gabek
I can work on this!

[gabek]

Cool @varungujarathi9! I know nothing about packaging for Flatpak myself, but go for it! Feel free to update here if you want to discuss anything about it.

[varungujarathi9]

@gabek
I was able to create the Flatpak of the owncast executable. Where should I put the build commands and where should the .flatpak file be saved in our repo?

[gabek]

I'm not sure. What is included in building a flatpak? What is included in a .flatpak file? Is it something that is stored in a Git repository, or is it something that gets sent to a Flathub or something? I don't know much about it, so I don't have the answers at the moment.

[varungujarathi9]

So right now, I am building an executable using go build and creating flatpak of that executable.

A .flatpak file is like a .deb file that can be used to install an application. Once installed the app can be run using flatpak run command

[gabek]

Oh ok, got it. We shouldn't be saving binaries in our repo, but we can build and add the .flatpak file as a part of our release process.

Our releases are built using Earthly, using the Earthfile. This build process already creates a binary for different architectures using go build, so you could probably take that same binary artifact and build the flatpak out of it by creating a new flatpak target that copies the binary from the build step and does whatever you need from it. There's some documentation here: https://docs.earthly.dev/basics/part-1-a-simple-earthfile

Feel free to let me know if you want to talk through this at all.

Part 1: A simple Earthfile | Earthly 0.8 | Earthly