If you follow me on the fediverse (@cassidy@blaede.family), you may have seen me recently gushing about ROTA, a video game I recently discovered. Besides the absolutely charming design and ridiculously satisfying gameplay, the game itself is open source, meaning the developer has published the game’s underlying code out to the world for anyone to see, learn from, and adapt.

As someone passionate about the Linux desktop ecosystem broadly and Flathub as an app store specifically, I was excited by the possibility of helping to get ROTA onto Flathub so more people could play it—plus, such a high-quality game being on Flathub helps the reputation and image of Flathub itself. So I kicked off a personal project (with the support of my employer¹) to get it onto Flathub—and I learned a lot—especially what steps were confusing or unclear.

As a result, here’s how I recommend publishing your Godot Engine game to Flathub. Oh, and don’t be too scared; despite the monumental size of this blog post, I promise it’s actually pretty easy! 😇

Overview

Let’s take a look at what we’re going to achieve at a high level. This post assumes you have source code for a game built with a relatively recent version of Godot Engine (e.g. Godot Engine 3 or 4), access to a Linux computer or VM for testing, and a GitHub account. If you’re missing one of those, get that sorted before continuing! You can also check the list of definitions at the bottom of this page for reference if you need to better understand something, and be sure to check out the Flathub documentation for a lot more details on Flatpak publishing in general.

Illustration with the Godot Engine logo, then an arrow pointing to the Flathub logo

To build a Flatpak of a Godot Engine game, we only need three things:

Exported PCK file
Desktop Entry, icon, and MetaInfo files
Flatpak manifest to put it all together

The trick is knowing how and where to provide each of these for the best experience publishing your game (and especially updates) to Flathub. There are a bunch of ways you can do it, but I strongly recommend:

Upload your PCK file to a public, versioned URL, e.g. as a source code release artifact.
Include the Desktop Entry, icon, and MetaInfo files in the repo with your game’s source code if it’s open source, or provide them via a dedicated repo, versioned URL, or source code release artifact.

You can alternatively upload these directly to the Flatpak Manifest repository created by Flathub, but it’s better to keep them with your game’s other files if possible.
Your manifest will live in a dedicated GitHub repo owned by the Flathub org. It’s nice (but not required) to also include a version of your manifest with your game’s source code for easier development and testing.

Before we get into each of those steps in more detail, you will need to pick an app ID for your game. This is a unique machine-oriented (not intended for humans to need to know) ID used across the Linux desktop and throughout the Flatpak process. It must be in valid reverse domain name notation (RDNN) format for a domain or code hosting account associated with the game; for example, if your website is example.com, the ID should begin with com.example. I strongly recommend using your own domain name rather than an io.itch. or io.github. prefix here, but ultimately it is up to you. Note that as of writing, Itch.io-based IDs cannot be verified on Flathub.

1. Handling Your PCK File

When you export a Godot Engine game for PC, you’re actually creating a platform-agnostic PCK file that contains all of your game’s code and assets, plus any plugins and libraries. The export also provides a copy of the platform-specific binary for your game which—despite its name—is actually just the Godot Engine runtime. The runtime simply looks for a PCK file of the same name sitting on disk next to it, and runs it. If you’re familiar with emulating retro games, you can think of the binary file as the Godot “emulator”, and the PCK file as your game’s “ROM.”

To publish to Flathub, we’ll first need your game’s exported PCK file accessible somewhere on the web via a public, versioned URL. We’ll include that URL in the Flatpak manifest later so Flatpak Builder knows where to get the PCK file to bundle it with the Godot Engine binary into a Flatpak. Technically any publicly-accessible URL works here, but if your game is open source, I highly recommend you attach the PCK file as a release artifact wherever your source code is hosted (e.g. GitHub). This is the most similar to how open source software is typically released and distributed, and will be the most familiar to Flathub reviewers as well as potential contributors to your game.

No matter where you publish your PCK file, the URL needs to be public, versioned, and stable: Flatpak Builder should always get the exact same file when hitting that URL for that release, and if you make a new release of your game, that version’s PCK file needs to be accessible at a new URL. I highly recommend semantic versioning for this, but it at least needs to be incrementally versioned so it’s always obvious to Flathub reviewers which version is newest, and so it matches to the version in the MetaInfo (more on that later). Match your game’s regular versioning scheme if possible.

Bonus Points: Export in CI

Since Godot Engine is open source and has command-line tools that run on Linux, you can use a source code platform’s continuous integration (CI) feature to automatically export and upload your PCK file. This differs a bit depending on your source code hosting platform and Godot Engine version, but triggered by a release, you run a job to:

Grab the correct version of the Godot Engine tools binary from their GitHub release
Export the PCK file from the command line (Godot Docs)
Upload that PCK file to the release itself

This is advantageous because it ensures the PCK file attached to the release is exported from the exact code from in the release, increasing transparency and reducing the possibility of human error. Here is one example of such a CI workflow.

About That Binary…

Since the exported bina...

Cassidy James Blaede: Publish Your Godot Engine Game to Flathub

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