[Feature] Ship a Flatpak repository

[leo60228]

Verified feature request does not already exist?

• I have searched and found no existing issue

💻

• Would you like to implement this feature?

Pitch: what problem are you trying to solve?

The shipped Flatpak files in GitHub releases are useful, but a major benefit to Flatpak is providing automatic updates.

Describe your ideal solution to this problem

Ideally, a Flatpak repository with new updates would be available. This is just a static folder structure with the application and metadata served over HTTPS. Flatpak provides documentation on this here, though I'm not sure how this integrates with electron-builder: https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/hosting-a-repository.html

Teaching and learning

The Flatpak download on the website should be a .flatpakref instead of a .flatpak. This provides the same user experience, but will allow automatic updates.

[github-actions]

✨ Thanks for sharing your idea! ✨

This repository uses lodash style issue management for enhancements. That means enhancement issues are automatically closed. This doesn’t mean we don’t accept feature requests, though! We will consider implementing ones that receive many upvotes, and we welcome contributions for any feature requests marked as needing votes (just post a comment first so we can help you make a successful contribution).

The enhancement backlog can be found here: https://github.com/actualbudget/actual/issues?q=label%3A%22needs+votes%22+sort%3Areactions-%2B1-desc+

Don’t forget to upvote the top comment with 👍!

[leo60228]

Hmm, this may be more difficult to implement than I'd hoped, since it seems like it will require manual invocation of flatpak-builder instead of having electron-builder do it automatically: https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/electron.html

[leo60228]

Actually, while this isn't allowed for Flathub, I think it should still be possible to build a repository from the built .flatpak using flatpak build-import-bundle and flatpak build-update-repo:

[root@penumbra:~/flatpak-test]$ ostree init --repo=repo

[root@penumbra:~/flatpak-test]$ flatpak build-import-bundle repo Actual-linux.flatpak
Importing app/com.actualbudget.actual/x86_64/master (139d61411b04f3a32718722c353642601704eb9c697a93d319fdf306b6c64230)

[root@penumbra:~/flatpak-test]$ flatpak build-update-repo repo
Updating appstream branch
No appstream data for app/com.actualbudget.actual/x86_64/master: No such file or directory: /files/share/app-info
Updating summary

[root@penumbra:~/flatpak-test]$ flatpak remote-ls file://$PWD/repo
Name         Application ID                Version       Branch
actual       com.actualbudget.actual                     master

[leo60228]

I would be interested in implementing this, though I'm not sure what the desired way to integrate this into the release process would be.

[leo60228]

Actually, I'm not sure that a better solution wouldn't be to just contribute a package to Flathub.... electron-builder seems to have poor support for Flatpak in general.