pygame flatpak test

Flatpak packaging for pygame

Flatpak is a sandboxed application packaging system for Linux (developer docs). Pygame is a framework for making games.

June 2018

I've focused on using flatpak-builder with JSON manifests, rather than the Python tool I started last year. Apps hosted on Flathub have to be built this way.

The main files of interest are:

org.pygame.baseapp.json

A 'base app' with all pygame's dependencies

org.pygame.baseapp-py35.json

A 'base app' building on the previous one by adding pygame itself. This uses the Freedesktop 1.6 runtime, which contains Python 3.5.

org.pygame.aliens.json

A sample application which launches the Aliens example game included with pygame.

---

March 2017

This is an experimental tool to make Flatpak packages for pygame games. To use it:

1. You will need a Linux system with Flatpak >= 0.8 installed, such as Fedora 25 or Ubuntu 17.10.

2. Install using pip install pygame_fpak. The tool needs Python 3 to run, even if your game uses Python 2.

3. Create a pygame-fpak.toml config file like this:

   # At the moment, you can specify "3.6", "3.4" or "2.7".
   # 3.6 produces a somewhat bigger app to download.
   python = "3.6"
   # User-visible name
   name = "Solarwolf"
   # Identifier based on a reverse domain name you control. E.g. if your
   # project is on Github, you could use io.github.username.reponame
   appid = "org.pygame.solarwolf"
   # Files/directories needed to run the game - relative paths from where
   # the config file lives.
   files = [
     "solarwolf"
   ]
   # The function to start your game. This will be called like:
   # from solarwolf.cli import main; main()
   entry-point = "solarwolf.cli:main"
   
   # Icons in different sizes. Icons should be square, sizes are pixels
   # along one side of a square. 32, 48 and 64 are common.
   [icons]
   64 = "dist/solarwolf.png"

4. Run python3 -m pygame_fpak pygame-fpak.toml.

---

The other code in this repo builds the base apps for the tool described above. To build & install them:

# Slow, but only needed once:
make install-runtime

# Build the base applications and install them:
make install-baseapp-py36.done
make install-baseapp-py34.done
make install-baseapp-py27.done

There are three variants of the base application:

• -py36 includes Python 3.6 as /app/bin/python3. This is approximately 30 MiB to download, and 140 MiB when installed. The Aliens example is built on this by default.
• -py34 uses Python 3.4, which is provided by the freedesktop.org runtime. This makes it smaller - about 7 MiB to download, and 40 MiB installed - but you can't use the latest Python features in your code.
• py27 uses Python 2.7. It is a similar size to the Python 3.4 base app.

Flatpak applications use a runtime, a bundle of common libraries and executables. If your application is the first a user installs with a given runtime, Flatpak will download the runtime as well. Hopefully most apps will share a few runtimes, so that installation is quick and easy.