by the OBS Team posted on 18th Feb 2021

Flatpak is a software for building, installing and running Linux apps. The runtime offers a sandbox with restricted permissions. Each app comes as a bundle, and while two different apps can depend on different versions of the same dependency, they can run isolated from each other in parallel.

OBS now supports building flatpak bundles, so you can build your own!

Quick Start

Even if you have never built a flatpak app, you can quickly make your first step by branching the Template package. This will provide you with an already preconfigured project and package.

Go to ImageTemplates
Select “Template for Flatpak”
Enter a name and click “Create”

Go to FlatpakTemplate
Click on “Actions -> Branch package”
Click on the “Branch” button

After creating the package, OBS will start building. This can take a while.

When OBS finished publishing, you will find a .flatpak file in your folder under https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/your-user:/branches:/OBS:/FlatpakTemplates/

Download the file and install it:

flatpak install --user org.gnome.Mahjongg-3.36.2.flatpak

You built and installed your first flatpak app!

Details

This will be documented soon at our OBS package formats page.

For a successful Flatpak build you need four things:

The project configuration. Example
The project meta configuration. Example
A flatpak manifest file flatpak.yaml. Example
The sources mentioned in the manifest in form of tar archives

Configuration

For the configuration you can simply copy from or branch the Template package.

Manifest

The manifest file should be called flatpak.yaml. You can find a detailed reference at the official documentation.

Because Flatpak manifests don’t have a version field, and our downloadable files should have a version number, you can add a special #!BuildVersion field, ideally at the top of the YAML file. It is not required, but if you leave it out, you will always get version 0.

#!BuildVersion: 3.14.15
---
app-id: org.gnome.Mahjongg
runtime: org.gnome.Platform
sdk: org.gnome.Sdk
runtime-version: '3.36'
# etc.

How Does the Build Work?

OBS is not a replacement for Flathub, so we had to find a solution for providing the basic dependencies.

To make this work, we are installing the several platform images and SDKs in a container, tar the files together and create RPM packages from that.

This way they can be fetched as dependencies like in other builds. The correct platform/SDK and version is parsed from the manifest file. Parsing is done by the Build::Flatpak module.

Screenshots

Here are some screenshots of the project creation via ImageTemplates:

Create new project from Image Templates — Created new project from Image Templates

How To Give Us Feedback

There are two ways to reach us:

On GitHub, by opening an issue and / or commenting on an already opened issue.
On IRC, by talking directly to us. We are in the channel #opensuse-buildservice on Libera.Chat.

Please note that we favor GitHub to gather feedback as it allows us to easily keep track of the discussions.

Introducing Flatpak Builds