External Data Checker

The Flatpak External Data Checker is a tool that can be used to automatically check for updates to external sources in the Flatpak manifest.

Configuration

A global External Data Checker action runs hourly on Flathub by default. If the application manifest has a checker configured and if there are newer versions of external data found, a pull request with the update will be created through the flathubbot GitHub account.

By default, the global action only supports the default GitHub branch but External Data Checker can be configured to run on multiple branches through a custom workflow.

If a custom workflow is being used, please disable the default Flathub provided workflow.

Only create updates for important modules

You can configure External Data Checker to only create updates for modules that are marked as important. This is done by creating a flathub.json file with the following contents:

flathub.json

{
  "require-important-update": true
}

This also needs your module config to have is-important: true set.

Automatically merge PRs

danger

This is not allowed by default on Flathub without a Linter exception to flathub-json-automerge-enabled

note

Automatically merging PRs ensures each update builds, but does not guarantee the app will launch or run correctly. We highly recommend human-testing each PR before merging it.

You can configure External Data Checker to automatically merge PRs. This is done by creating a flathub.json file in the root of your manifest's repo with the following contents:

flathub.json

{
  "automerge-flathubbot-prs": true
}

Disable

You can opt out of External Data Checker by creating a flathub.json file in the root of your manifest's repo with the following contents:

flathub.json

{
  "disable-external-data-checker": true
}

Run on multiple branches

By default, the Flathub provided External Data checker workflow runs only on the default branch of the GitHub repository, but a custom workflow can be defined to run it on multiple branches. This is useful for extensions or baseapps which have multiple branches - one for each runtime version.

This uses the docker image published by External Data Checker upstream.

First opt out of the default Flathub provided workflow.

Then, this needs to be committed to the Github repo at .github/workflows/update.yaml.

name: Check for updates
on:
  schedule:
    - cron: '0 14 * * 1' # Run once a week, on Monday, at 14:00
  workflow_dispatch: {}
jobs:
  flatpak-external-data-checker:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    if: github.repository_owner == 'flathub'
    strategy:
      matrix:
        branch: [ branch/23.08, branch/24.08, beta ]
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
        with:
          ref: ${{ matrix.branch }}
      - uses: docker://ghcr.io/flathub/flatpak-external-data-checker:latest
        env:
          GIT_AUTHOR_NAME: Flatpak External Data Checker
          GIT_COMMITTER_NAME: Flatpak External Data Checker
          GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL: 41898282+github-actions[bot]@users.noreply.github.com
          GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL: 41898282+github-actions[bot]@users.noreply.github.com
          EMAIL: 41898282+github-actions[bot]@users.noreply.github.com
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
        with:
          args: --update --never-fork <MANIFEST FILENAME>