AppStream Generator

AppStream is an effort to provide additional metadata and unique IDs for all software available in a Linux system. This repository contains the server-side of the AppStream infrastructure, a tool to generate metadata from distribution packages. You can find out more about AppStream collection metadata at Freedesktop.

The AppStream generator is currently primarily used by Debian, but is written in a distribution agnostic way. Backends only need to implement two interfaces to to be ready.

If you are looking for the AppStream client-tools, the AppStream repository is where you want to go.

Development

Build dependencies

LDC1
Meson (>= 0.46) 2
GLibD 3
AppStream 4
libarchive (>= 3.2) 5
LMDB 6
GirToD 7
Containers 8
Cairo
GdkPixbuf 2.0
RSvg 2.0
FreeType
Fontconfig
Pango
Yarn (optional) 9

On Debian and derivatives of it, all build requirements can be installed using the following command:

sudo apt install meson ldc gir-to-d libappstream-dev libgdk-pixbuf2.0-dev libarchive-dev \
    librsvg2-dev liblmdb-dev libcairo2-dev libcurl4-gnutls-dev libfreetype6-dev libfontconfig1-dev \
    libpango1.0-dev libglibd-2.0-dev libdcontainers-dev

Build instructions

To build the tool with Meson, create a build subdirectory, change into it and run meson .. && ninja to build. In summary:

$ mkdir build && cd build
$ meson -Ddownload-js=true ..
$ ninja
$ sudo ninja install

We support several options to be set to influence the build. Change into the build directory and run mesonconf to see them all.

You might want to perform an optimized debug build by passing --buildtype=debugoptimized to meson or just do a release build straight away with --buildtype=release in case you want to use the resulting binaries productively. By default, the build happens without optimizations which slows down the generator.

Usage

Take a look at the docs/ directory in the source tree for information on how to use the generator and write configuration files for it.

Hacking