Brewfile-like management of Flatpaks

General
1

Motivating use-case:

j0rge on the Universal Blue Discord:
plus if I could put my CLI and GUI apps in one Brewfile, check it into github and I’d be done

I have no knowledge of (or interest in) Ruby, so I’m not gonna figure out the ideal solution of listing Flatpak apps in the Brewfile; instead, as a “dirty hack”/“preliminary prototype” I have my Homebrew packages in my Brewfile and my Flatpak apps in a separate file (which I’m calling “Flatpakfile”) which I sync with GitHub via chezmoi. Here’s the lazy-ish UX:

  • Every time I log in, systemd automatically runs a user service named flatpak-dump.service which updates ~/.Flatpakfile according to the list of installed Flatpak apps on your system. As a treat, systemd also automatically runs a user service named homebrew-dump.service which updates ~/.Brewfile according to the list of installed Homebrew packages on your system.
  • It’s up to you how to manage your ~/.Flatpakfile and ~/.Brewfile. I personally have them tracked in chezmoi, so changes to them show up in my local chezmoi git repo whenever I run chezmoi re-add, at which point I can commit and push those changes to my GitHub dotfiles repo. I might eventually add a systemd user service to automatically run chezmoi re-add after homebrew-dump.service and flatpak-dump.service, I haven’t decided yet.
  • When you’ve made changes to your ~/.Flatpakfile or ~/.Brewfile (e.g. from a chezmoi apply) and you want to install any new packages from those files, you can just run systemctl --user start flatpak-install.service (defined here) or systemctl --user start homebrew-install.service (defined here), respectively. If you want to run those services on an automatic schedule, you can define corresponding systemd timer units; I haven’t done that yet because I haven’t thought about any potential feedback loops I might cause if I’m careless in setting up automation triggers/schedules.

Caveat: currently, if you’ve manually removed packages from your Flatpakfile or Brewfile, you’ll need to manually uninstall them directly via flatpak or homebrew. But maybe I can throw together a simple script which diffs the state of the Flatpakfile/Brewfile with the actual list of installed Flatpak apps/Homebrew packages and then uninstalls any Flatpak apps/Homebrew packages not listed in the Flatpakfile/Brewfile…that way, Flatpakfile and Brewfile would provide an approximately declarative UX. If at least one other person here is interested in using that functionality, I’ll try implementing it.

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