elementary App Template

a template to develop Apps for elementary OS and its AppCenter

This template is based on the official elementary Developer Documentation. Simply download it and your ready to hack!

Table of Contents

• Prerequisites
• Build System
• Translations
• Icons
• Packaging
• Testing

Prerequisites

This app template assumes you installed the following as documented in The Basic Setup of the elementary Developer Documentation:

• Development Libraries (elementary-sdk)
• elementary Flatpak Platform and Sdk (io.elementary.Platform and io.elementary.Sdk)

Build System

The Build System is preconfigured an ready to use according to The Build System described in the elementary Developer Documentation.

Compile, Install and Start

That said, you can simply execute the following commands in your Terminal from the project root to compile, install and start this template:

meson build --prefix=/usr
ninja -C build install
com.github.yourusername.yourrepositoryname

Uninstall

Execute the following command to remove the app template's binary from your system:

sudo ninja -C build uninstall

Translations

This template is fully translatable and everything is setup as described in the Translations section of the elementary Developer Documentation'

Update translations

Remember that each time you add new translatable strings or change old ones, you should regenerate your *.pot and *.po files using the *-pot and *-update-po build targets from the previous two steps as follows:

ninja -C build com.github.yourusername.yourrepositoryname-pot
ninja -C build com.github.yourusername.yourrepositoryname-update-po

Add more languages

If you want to support more languages, just list them in the LINGUAS file and generate the new po file with the *-update-po target:

ninja -C build com.github.yourusername.yourrepositoryname-update-po

Icons

Support for icons is configured too according to the Icons section of the elementary Developer Documentation.

Packaging

Support for Flatpak is builtin as well and setup according to the Packaging section of the elementary Developer Documentation.

Compile, Package and Install

To run a test build and install your app, you can execute flatpak-builder from the project root:

flatpak-builder build com.github.yourusername.yourrepositoryname.yml --user --install --force-clean

Uninstall

flatpak uninstall com.github.yourusername.yourrepositoryname --user

Testing

Unit Tests - tests/unit/…

To run the Unit Tests, you can execute the following command from the project root:

ninja -C build test

UI Tests - tests/ui/…

To run the UI Tests, you can execute the following command from the project root:

ninja -C build test