Flatpak for Terminal or Server Applications

[Daniel Kasak]

Hi Katherine. You're correct that Flatpak is primarily targeting GUI
apps. I can't speak for the dev team or direction this will take, but
I'll let you know my experiences. I've used Flatpak to package an ETL
framework ( https://github.com/Ringerrr/Open_SDF - I'm about to do an
'official' launch of the Flatpak version ) , which is composed of 2
separate codebases - one a gtk GUI, and one a console-only application
( the execution framework ). I primarily intended everything to run
with a GUI installed as well. However for users who can only run web
apps ( eg OSX ), I set up a broadway mode ( gtk's html5 backend ), and
deployed on an EC2 instance. I have some systemd scripts that start
our a minimalist web server ( a pure perl one ) with a login page (
this is part of our flatpak package ), which then forks a GUI process
( running in broadway mode ) when a user authenticates. Additionally,
we have the capability of launching the console-only app remotely ( we
execute the flatpak app via ssh ). We've never had any issues with
either the GUI or the console-only app. X never runs on this EC2
instance.

Things might change in the future of course. But up to now ... it
actually works remarkably well.

Dan

On Fri, Sep 20, 2019 at 9:27 AM Katherine Pata <me at katherine.sh> wrote:
>
> After recently distro hopping to try the new shiny things in Fedora, and not having access to all the packages I used to have, I've been thinking about how to handle this issue. Looking into managing my own spec files for rpms doesn't sound like a bad solution, but honestly, if I'm going to put in the effort anyways, I would like to easily share it with everyone else.
>
> Considering there is nothing quite as seamless as the AUR on Fedora (copr's are nice, but discoverability and how well maintained they are is relatively subpar), and I want to avoid snapd due to a lack of control for the user in many aspects, as well as the forced centralization... I've really wanted to look into Flatpak packaging. For things like helm, terraform, i3blocks, etc, I would love to be able to package them and share them across people using different distributions.
>
> However, after looking into it, my impression is that Flatpak seems to be very very heavily focused on GUI applications, to the point of making assumptions about there being a graphical environment running. The FAQ, as well as a bunch of posts, have given me this impression. Are there any plans on perhaps supporting terminal applications (e.g. grep, ssh, terraform, helm, etc), system/daemon/desktop environment packages (e.g. sshd, dunst, i3blocks, i3wm), or server software (nginx, memcached, openldap)? (the examples are arbitrary) Perhaps this is already possible, just not well advertised?
>
> I would love to receive more information on this, as I would be really interested in maintaining some packages for software that I personally use.
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