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 be ready.

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

Install from Flathub

You can install an up-to-date version of AppStream Generator from Flathub if you just want to quickly test the software with your repository:

# Add Flathub remote
sudo flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
# Install appstream-generator
flatpak install org.freedesktop.appstream.generator

# Run appstream-generator
flatpak run org.freedesktop.appstream.generator --help

You can use AppStream Generator as documented, but you will need to replace all appstream-generator commands with flatpak run org.freedesktop.appstream.generator and may need to set the workspace as absolute path using -w instead of relying on autodetection.

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.

Development

Build dependencies

This project requires a C++23-capable compiler, GCC >= 14 or Clang >= 18 is recommended.

The following libraries and tools are required to build the generator:

• Meson (>= 1.0) 1
• AppStream 2
• libarchive (>= 3.2) 3
• LMDB 4
• Curl
• Cairo
• GdkPixbuf 2.0
• RSvg 2.0
• FreeType
• Fontconfig
• Pango
• Inja 5
• Catch2 6
• oneAPI TBB 7
• NPM (optional) 8

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

sudo apt install meson g++ \
    libappstream-dev libappstream-compose-dev libsoup2.4-dev libarchive-dev \
    libgdk-pixbuf2.0-dev librsvg2-dev libcairo2-dev libfreetype-dev libfontconfig1-dev \
    libpango1.0-dev liblmdb-dev libtbb-dev libcatch2-dev \
    npm

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.

Hacking

Pull-requests and patches are very welcome! Using C++23 features is encouraged, if sensible. Make sure your code compiles in maintainer mode, and format your changes to adhere to the project's coding style. To help with the latter we provide the autoformat.py helper script to format code via clang-format.