flatpak-builder-tools

Flatpak Builder Tools is a collection of community-contributed scripts used to assist in building applications without network access using flatpak-builder.

The primary function of these tools is to generate Flatpak Builder source or module manifests. These generated manifests can then be included in your main Flatpak Builder manifest to facilitate offline builds.

When using github.com/dennwc/flatpak-go-mod, you must include the generated modules.txt file in your Flatpak manifest to ensure the vendor directory is correctly structured. This is done by adding a file type source pointing to modules.txt and setting its destination to vendor.

    sources:
      - type: git
        url: https://github.com/golang/tools
        commit: e81af27852c63b9432c0b5bb49707a7f207ef21b

      # Workaround for Go modules generated by github.com/dennwc/flatpak-go-mod
      - type: file
        path: modules.txt
        dest: vendor

      - type: archive
        url: https://proxy.golang.org/github.com/yuin/goldmark/@v/v1.4.13.zip
        strip-components: 3
        dest: vendor/github.com/yuin/goldmark
        sha256: bb41a602b174345fda392c8ad83fcc93217c285c763699677630be90feb7a5e3

The Flatpak Deno Generator currently has the following constraints:

• Lockfile Version: Only supports lockfile V5 (introduced in Deno version 2.3).
• Dependency Separation: Dependencies are split between deno_dir (npm) and vendor (jsr/http). This is due to Deno's internal metadata checks for JSR and HTTPS dependencies which prevent them from being treated purely as standard npm-style dependencies.

By default, the tool selects artifacts from PyPI with the following priority:

1. Universal wheels (none-any.whl)
2. Source distributions (sdist)

Platform-specific wheels are ignored by default. To enable them, use the --prefer-wheels option followed by a comma-separated list of package names.

Note: When using --prefer-wheels, you must provide a --runtime argument. The runtime must include Python, pip, and the python-packaging module so the tool can determine the correct platform tags (Python version, ABI, and architecture).

# Example: Prefer platform wheels for cryptography and cffi for x86_64 and aarch64
./flatpak-pip-generator --runtime org.freedesktop.Sdk//25.08 --prefer-wheels=cryptography,cffi cryptography

The Flatpak PIP Generator requires the requirements-parser library to function. You can install it on your host system using pip3.

pip3 install --user requirements-parser

The yarn generator is deprecated. Users should migrate to using flatpak-node-generator for generating Flatpak manifests for Node.js projects using Yarn.

Refer to the flatpak-node-generator documentation for the current implementation and usage instructions.

The recommended way to install flatpak-node-generator is via pipx. This tool is a modern successor to flatpak-npm-generator and flatpak-yarn-generator, supporting Node 10+ and package managers including npm, yarn, and pnpm.

If you encounter a JSONDecodeError during installation, try deleting the local pipx virtualenv located in ~/.local/share/pipx on Linux.

$ pipx install git+https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak-builder-tools.git#subdirectory=node

To create the generated-sources.json file required for building an Electron-based Flatpak, use the flatpak-node-generator tool. You must provide the path to the package-lock.json file of the project you are targeting.

Important: Ensure that your local clone of the project (e.g., electron-quick-start) is at the same commit as specified in your Flatpak manifest file to ensure consistency between the generated sources and the source code.

flatpak-node-generator npm /path/to/electron-quick-start/package-lock.json

If your Deno project uses npm dependencies, you must point the DENO_DIR environment variable to the deno_dir directory provided by the generator within your Flatpak build module configuration.

- name: someModule
  buildsystem: simple
  build-options:
    env:
      DENO_DIR: deno_dir

The Flatpak .NET Generator is a tool that automatically generates a flatpak-builder sources file from a .NET Core .csproj file. This allows you to include NuGet dependencies as sources in your Flatpak build.

To use the generated file in your flatpak-builder manifest, you must source the enable.sh script for the dotnet SDK and include the --source nuget-sources argument in your dotnet commands so that the build process can find the generated source files.

modules:
  - name: my-module
    buildsystem: simple
    build-commands:
      - '. /usr/lib/sdk/dotnet/enable.sh; dotnet build -f netcoreapp2.1 -c Release --source nuget-sources my.input.Desktop.csproj'
    sources:
      - my-output-sources.json