Home

Running the tool locally

The simplest use of this tool is by calling:

flatpak-external-data-checker MANIFEST_FILE

it should display messages about any broken or outdated external data.

Running in a container

flatpak-external-data-checker is avaiable as an OCI image from GitHub Container Registry. This is a convenient way to get all necessary dependencies regardless of your host system's distribution.

You can use the run-in-container.sh helper script to set up needed CLI options for you and run the image using podman:

~/src/endlessm/flatpak-external-data-checker/run-in-container.sh \
    [ARGS …] \
    ~/src/flathub/com.example.App/com.example.App.json

Automatically submitting PRs

When run with the --update flag, this tool can commit any necessary changes to Git and open a GitHub pull request. In order to do this, it requires a GitHub access token, specified in the GITHUB_TOKEN environment variable.

The tool will also automatically merge previously opened pull request for unavailable (BROKEN) sources if the change has successfully passed CI checks and the token has sufficient privileges. It can be disabled by setting automerge-flathubbot-prs to false in flathub.json.

Changes to Flatpak manifests

For simple checks to see if a URL is broken, no changes are needed. However, you can add additional metadata to the manifest to allow the checker to discover new versions.

Some of the following checkers are able to determine upstream version number, and automatically add it to releases list in metainfo. To specify which source is the app upstream source, set property is-main-source to true in the checker metadata for that source.