Packaging Ghostty for Flatpak/Flathub #3201
Replies: 23 comments 51 replies
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This should be a discussion since there isn't a directly actionable result from this. 😄 |
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@mitchellh I think one thing that would be actionable is allowing the |
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My current workaround is to apply the following patch: diff --git a/build.zig b/build.zig
index b1b992fe..ff4c65b7 100644
--- a/build.zig
+++ b/build.zig
@@ -144,7 +144,7 @@ pub fn build(b: *std.Build) !void {
if (emit_bench or emit_test_exe or emit_helpgen) break :emit_docs false;
// We always emit docs in system package mode.
- if (system_package) break :emit_docs true;
+ // if (system_package) break :emit_docs true;
// We only default to true if we can find pandoc.
const path = Command.expandPath(b.allocator, "pandoc") catch |
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As an alternative solution, it might be deemed viable to host a custom repository (ideally on the Ghostty website) and allow users to install the repository with a flatpakref. |
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There is no point in packaging this as a Flatpak until Ghostty gets a solution like Ptyxis which runs an agent on the host. As far as I know, that does currently not exist. |
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Nothing more than what is already mentioned. Happy to connect y'all with the author of Ptyxis to learn more. |
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@tristan957 What I mean is that neither your comment nor the mentioned link explain what this "agent" is and more importantly why it's needed. The equivalent of "Go talk to these people to find out" isn't really helpful. |
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Then please ignore and continue your process. Good luck! |
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Yeah, “no point” is a bit of an overstatement. Other terminal emulators (e.g. Konsole, Blackbox) are packaged as Flatpaks with very permissive sandboxing and work fine. The host agent is mainly for integrating container/Flatpak management and foreground processes with the UI (see Prompt – Happenings in GNOME). A Ghostty Flatpak can certainly be useful without such an agent. Not to dogpile, just want to add context for anyone browsing who might think this effort is more blocked than it actually is :) |
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You don't need an agent if you use |
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There appears to be another issue with using The way I can reproduce this is as follows: #!/usr/bin/env bash
set -e
VERSION=1.0.0
ARCHIVE=ghostty-source.tar.gz
wget "https://release.files.ghostty.org/${VERSION}/${ARCHIVE}"
tar -xf "${ARCHIVE}"
rm "${ARCHIVE}"
cd ghostty-source
ZIG_GLOBAL_CACHE_DIR=vendor ./nix/build-support/fetch-zig-cache.sh
zig build --system vendor/p |
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It seems this error is resolved when passing an absolute path to |
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I managed to get things to build, albeit in a way that's not suitable for Flathub:
The code for this proof of concept is found in https://github.com/yorickpeterse/ghostty-flatpak. To build, run the following: bash deps.sh
flatpak-builder --disable-rofiles-fuse --force-clean --user --install-deps-from=flathub --repo=repo --install builddir org.ghostty.ghostty.ymlThe |
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Similar tools exist for other languages here, but unfortunately zig does not yet have one. It might be helpful to see how it's done in other languages and write a similar tool for zig? |
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There's zig2nix. It can produce a JSON file that looks like this: |
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This looks very close to what flatpak manifest files expect. Some formatting should make the script usable for flatpaks. e.g. this is an autogenerated rust dependency |
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Building from source is not a hard requirement on Flathub, especially if there are tooling issues. You could just repackage existing binaries and call it a day |
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@jcollie Said tool has been suggested in Discord as well, but I haven't looked into it yet deeply. I don't use Nix though, and from the README it wasn't clear how to build it without Nix. @faveoled Packaging an existing executable can introduce issues, such as the executable only working on a specific platform (e.g. x86-64) or simply not working any more at some point in the future due to some other change. As such, it's best to build from source with all the right dependencies and what not included, otherwise long term maintenance becomes a challenge. |
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There seems to already be a manifest and Flatpak integration in the repo, but it's a bit broken and no longer builds: |
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For those interested in Flatpak/Flathub support, this is currently blocked by #3616. Help with said issue would be greatly appreciated 😃 |
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While I like to chime in on having a Flatpak, I also want to point to notes from another terminal emulator that recommends native packaging over Flatpak: https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/install/linux.html?h=flatpak#installing-on-linux-via-flathub |
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I had my suspicions about this as well. It's nice for sandboxing electron/similar apps, for example slack or discord, however I found that for example installing vscode via flatpak is quite a fool's errand for the reasons stated, especially as an extension developer. I agree with the reasoning - as you gain the trustworthiness of the new emulator, upgrade to native packaging |
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Natively installed terminal apps like Btop don't open from the app launcher when I have Ptyxis as a flatpak. |
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dont know if this might help, but you could download all dependencies before the build starts. I did the same here for prusa slicer: https://github.com/flathub/com.prusa3d.PrusaSlicer/blob/d32b6e63bb7b6b690ac40749d462898c62a6d141/com.prusa3d.PrusaSlicer.yml#L97 |
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The NixOS Ghostty package is already using |
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The absolute paths do not work in nix sandbox either way, so I should probably remove the support. I notice lots of nixpkgs packages and projects such as zls using only the zon2nix part of zig2nix, I think that's fine and I don't intend to break that use case. I'll see if I can make it output the proper formatting as well to reduce the manual steps. |
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@Cloudef The zon2json tool looks like it would be incredibly useful. I'll give it a try to see if this is something we can use for building a Flatpak package 😃 |
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I spent some time playing around with the zon2json tool, and built a PoC to use that to generate Flatpak sources. While it sort of works, it doesn't quite handle recursive dependencies and after several hours I decided it was enough. My current plan is to build a |
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You can copy the bash script block from https://github.com/Cloudef/zig2nix/blob/master/tools/zon2json-lock.nix which will handle recursive deps. You have to replace the nix based hashing commands though. |
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https://github.com/yorickpeterse/ghostty-flatpak is now in a sort of OK state. That is, we pre-build an archive containing the dependencies and then host that using a GitHub release. It's a bit of a hack, but it's the most reliable way of providing the dependencies such that we can use this for a future Flathub package. Unfortunately, the resulting Flatpak application isn't terribly useful. Due to the Flatpak integration being broken, the application runs in its own environment. While it does have access to the file system, it won't be able to properly run host executables as various directories in As such, there's no point in submitting the package to Flathub at this stage. Thus, until the linked issue is resolved there's nothing more I can do. |
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@lihaohong6 I played with On the other hand, entering a Toolbox container does appear to work: Per flatpak/flatpak#3285 host-spawn might indeed be an option, but having to install yet another tool isn't great. |
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@yorickpeterse I checked Wezterm's solution and they are using |
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@lihaohong6 While I appreciate the suggestion, the real solution here is for people to look into this issue and figure out why the Flatpak integration is broken. Applying various workarounds when there's already an integration present is just silly. |
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It might be easier to use The main reason is that Ghostty terminal subprocess handling is tightly coupled to |
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@alaviss If this is integrated into Ghostty itself then that would indeed be fine (i.e. all commands just get wrapped in What I meant with my original comment (which in hindsight I didn't make clear enough) was that somehow patching the Flatpak to use |
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As per this commit I'm now able to build a Flatpak without having to host any dependencies myself, though it requires a patch until #6647 is merged. Unfortunately, running Ghostty is a different story: the Flatpak will start up, but the terminal screen is essentially blank and doesn't respond to any input:
The logs show the following: I suspect the following is the most interesting part: I'm guessing that the shell process isn't started correctly, though again I'm not familiar enough with the Ghostty codebase or its Flatpak integration to determine what is going on and how to resolve this issue. So once again, help would be much appreciated 😃 |
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The shell is started correctly, however there's no integration between the flatpak spawning code and Ghostty internal process tracking system, leading to the application thinking that it couldn't start the shell and abort. From the last time I looked at this, Here's the part where the error you saw was raised and where extra integration code would've to be written: Lines 98 to 119 in 843cc83 |
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See #6658 for a solution to this. |
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Hi, just curious, which name will be used for Flatpak package? |
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It will likely be You can keep track of #6678 for details on the progress. |
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Mitchell has previously stated that he wants to leave the class names and stuff as See also: https://discord.com/channels/1005603569187160125/1005603569711452192/1320924753346822175 in the Ghostty Discord server. TL;DR: remaining for historical purposes. |
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A small status update: The Flatpak build manifest has been merged to Not all features work right now, and below is what I found while testing:
If you are interested in running the latest build, you can download it from the latest Actions run. Select the first ✅ one, then scroll down to Artifacts and you will find the For submission into Flathub, I'm not quite sure how to go about this. Ideally I think Ghostty should be built using the project's own CI and uploaded directly to Flathub similar to how OBS and Firefox does it, but I don't see any obvious pointers in Flathub documentation about applying for that publishing pipeline. |
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Tracker for a few remaining TODOs to be eligible for Flathub: The current metainfo lacks a few components required by Flathub Guidelines, which are:
Some quality points for an app to be featured as an "App of the day":
Regarding direct uploads (assuming that's desirable):
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Hi There, I guess, it might be frustrating to see to mention here since it's plaguing discussions as well as issues but I think this one is different than them since this is related to the flatpak package (imo). I just built the flatpak on my localhost and installed it. When I start ghostty, I see below warning:
Is this due to my setup or something else? |
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That's normal unfortunately. Until #6661 lands, it's not possible for the host to use the terminfo bundled within the flatpak. While new ncurses now includes |
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@alaviss wow what a mess.. 😔 which configuration do you mean? Where should we set |
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Set it directly in your configuration: https://ghostty.org/docs/config/reference#term |
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It should be noted that Flatpaks aren't (yet) a fully supported and tested way to use Ghostty - though thanks to the effort of amazing community volunteers like @alaviss it's inching closer and closer to the finish line. I'll take a look at #6661 in a minute, though in the mean time bugs and incomplete features are very much to be expected. |
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Thank you @alaviss for your help and your contributions of making flatpak a reality! Highly appreciated! 🙏🏻 |
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Interestingly |
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It's a limitation of the way the sandbox was constructed. Whenever I think adding Other solutions that doesn't involve opening the sandbox up are probably:
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Ah, makes sense. I agree with your assessment. The PR with rationale is up at #7401, I’m relying on CI to confirm it builds 🤠 |
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One more quirk: it seems the Even with |
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Flatpak can be trivially detected by the presence of |
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I haven't looked further into this problem, but I imagine something like detecting the presence of the I won't rule out GTK eating that up early in the process, though. |
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I spent some time on the problem and the ideal is probably to use D-Bus activation, which desktop environments will use automatically but never happen on command line, and is also supported by Flatpak. An issue is that certain Ghostty configurations like |
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Good point, that would be the standard way to support single-instance rather than having the application try to figure it out internally. There are docs on the subject at https://developer.gnome.org/documentation/guidelines/maintainer/integrating.html#d-bus-activation. And the Ptyxis data files are a good reference https://gitlab.gnome.org/chergert/ptyxis/-/tree/main/data?ref_type=heads Even with This is probably an improvement to single-instance support even without considering Flatpak, actually. |
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FYI, I've had a patch to add DBus activation and a systemd user service to Ghostty hanging around for a while so I finally decided to clean it up and create a PR #7433. Not sure if it'll suit flatpak in it's current form but it's a starting point. |
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Looks like actions like opening the config and scrollback buffer might be broken. xdg-open seems to be available in the runtime so I’m not sure yet if the issue is with open.zig. |
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It'd be great to have some logs for this. I use open config quite often and it works just fine for me. I haven't tried the scroll back thing, though |
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Interesting. |
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iirc the xdg-open inside flatpak is wired to talk to portals by default. something might be wrong with yours. You can use an app like Bustle to monitor D-Bus transactions |
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I forgot Bustle existed. Yeah, |
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Can someone add a github action to upload the flatpak bundle to nightly build? |
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It'd even be better to host a flatpak repository directly via GH Pages or something similar. I think right now only @mitchellh can do anything about the release pipeline. I can create a PR but it's not practical for me to debug and do test runs. |
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In case anyone want to install the Flatpak builds without logging into GH, nightly.link comes in handy.
EDIT: As of #9926, these links no longer work as nightly.link does not support trigger events other than push. |
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I'm working on packaging Ghostty for Flatpak/Flathub. This brings some challenges with it, such as Flathub not allowing network access during the build process. The packaging guidelines outline some steps to take to build from a local package cache. Unfortunately, this introduces the following problems:
zig build --systemthe-Demit-docsoption is implied. This is unnecessary for Flatpak but results in build errors because Pandoc isn't installed in the sandboxFor problem one I created the following script to remove large redundant directories (e.g. some dependencies include 40 MiB worth of screenshots or 50 MiB test directories):
rm -rf vendor/p/*/{test,Test,screenshots,result,doc,data}This isn't ideal, but it ends up cutting the directory/archive size in half, though the resulting 200 MiB is still too large to include directly into a repository somewhere (and Flatpak doesn't support Git LFS for build sources). Ideally Ghostty release provide an archive containing just the dependencies such that this can be added as an extra dependency.
For problem two it appears there's no sensible solution right now. Probably the best option is to allow
-Demit-docs=falseto override the default implied by--system.Current status
#3201 (comment)
Related issues
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