Provide an official flatpak on flathub

[Hofer-Julian]

First, thanks a lot for your work. GitButler is fascinating, and I'd love to use it on a regular basis.

Since .deb packages are specific to Debian-based distributions and AppImage doesn't work on Wayland, I'd love to see if you'd take over the flatpak on flathub and fix the remaining paper cuts.

The (seemingly) flatpak specific ones that I noticed are:

• git binary cannot be found (probably best to package it within the flatpak)
• it cannot access git repositories after restart (I would just give it access to the whole home folder)
• it attempts to acccess some D-Bus service (need to figure out which one and poke a whole for it)

I also hope that #5609 helps here

[Byron]

Thanks a lot for the suggestion, and the helpful tips as well!

• git binary cannot be found (probably best to package it within the flatpak)

Most Git clients I tried ended up doing this, even though a FlatPak release seems to be a special case of this as to GitButler, git would just natively appear in the PATH if it's bundled? This is more of a rhetorical question, as I know nothing about FlatPak really.

• it attempts to acccess some D-Bus service (need to figure out which one and poke a whole for it)

This is probably keyring crate trying to read previously stored secrets from the system keychain. #5753 updates it to the latest version, which may also affect how this works on Linux.

CC @ndom91 who knows all about our FlatPak setup.

[ndom91]

Interesting timing haha. I've been working on a replacement flathub repo here for the past few days.

Building the app from scratch and bundling git seems to fix most issues. I also have pretty lenient flatoak sandbox rules atm, so maybe that's avoiding the dbus issue you're referring to.

Everything seems to work building the debug build locally. However I can't get the release build to build locally yet, I think that's a more general rust / tauri issue with my build system though. The tauri build process just segfaults toward the end.

The build/bundle GHA is also not quite working yet, but that one seems more easily fixable. It can't find the appstream-compose binary, even though its installed. Some bubblewrap issue probbaly

I've tried reaching out to the existing flathub gitbutler maintainer on our discord, they're a member, but haven't heard back.

[ndom91]

Also side note, the appimage doesn't work on wayland for you? I use it on Hyprland and another Ubuntu 24.04 gnome box regularly, what issues are you running into?

Alternarively, you can force gitbutler to run as an xwayland window by prepending the following env var to launching the appimage, i.e.

GDK_BACKEND="x11" ./GitButler.AppImage 

[Hofer-Julian]

@Byron

Most Git clients I tried ended up doing this, even though a FlatPak release seems to be a special case of this as to GitButler, git would just natively appear in the PATH if it's bundled? This is more of a rhetorical question, as I know nothing about FlatPak really.

Maybe you are more familiar with Docker? Flatpak behaves very similarly. Inside the container there's a filestructure resembling a classical unix file structure. If you put an executable into /usr/bin it will be in your PATH

[Hofer-Julian]

@ndom91

Interesting timing haha. I've been working on a replacement flathub repo here for the past few days.

That's awesome. Let me know when you can need a second pair of eyes for something

I've tried reaching out to the existing flathub gitbutler maintainer on our discord, they're a member, but haven't heard back.

Are you part of the GitButler team? If the current maintainer is unresponsive, don't hesitate to reach out to flathub maintainers. They will help to transfer ownership of the repository.

Also side note, the appimage doesn't work on wayland for you? I use it on Hyprland and another Ubuntu 24.04 gnome box regularly, what issues are you running into?

The AppImage started on my Fedora machine. I don't know if it used Wayland or XWayland behind the scenes. I was actually under the impression that AppImage is completely incompatible with Wayland because of this gist by the AppImage creator. When trying it out, I've hit the mentioned clipboard problem, which is why I couldn't log into GitButler and therefore also not GitHub. And of course it doesn't install a desktop file and doesn't have an icon.

[ndom91]

Oh interesting, I'd never seen that gist. No so generally our appimage should "just work"😅. Of course not installing a desktop file, etc. is definitely annoying, but we've worked around the open external links and clipboard problems afaik

I am on the gitbutler team, and yeah if it comes time to release it and I still haven't heard back then I'll reach out to the flathub team.

Once I can get the release build building either locally or in CI I'd be happy about some more testing and feedback! I can ping you back in this issue with a download link if that's cool 🙏

[Hofer-Julian]

Once I can get the release build building either locally or in CI I'd be happy about some more testing and feedback! I can ping you back in this issue with a download link if that's cool 🙏

Yes, please do that 🤝

[ndom91]

@Hofer-Julian alright so I've got it building the release build in CI finally. Unfortunately this still doesn't seem to communicate with the keyring correctly. I can login and everything works fine, however, as soon as I hard reload the application, or close / reopen it, the auth token is gone.

Looking into the keyring, it doesn't look like anything is ever written into there.

Anyway, besides for that I haven't found any big issues yet: https://github.com/ndom91/gitbutler-flathub/actions/runs/12223161843

[Hofer-Julian]

Awesome!

Actually, I cannot reproduce your problems.
It stores both GitButler and GitHub credentials just fine for me.
If I restart the application, I am still logged in.

[Hofer-Julian]

Copying link when logging into GitButler still doesn't work. Seems like I wrongly blamed AppImage for that. If I press on the whole field in order to trigger opening the browser instead, logging in works just fine.

[Byron]

Looking into the keyring, it doesn't look like anything is ever written into there.

Maybe you could try again with #5753 applied? It updates the keyring crate and maybe that changes something to the better.

[ndom91]

@Hofer-Julian oh great news then haha. I'm testing this on a pretty vanilla Ubuntu 24.04 VM though so I can't be the only one having this issue 🤔

However, on my local nixos system I can't reproduce the keyring issue either. I can, however, reproduce the clipboard issue

@Byron I'll give your keyring crate PR a test tomorrow

[Hofer-Julian]

The copying is especially weird, since copying works just fine during the github authentication process.