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What is F-Droid Server?

fdroidserver is a suite of tools to publish and work with collections of
Android apps (APK files) and other kinds of packages. It is used to maintain
the f-droid.org application repository. These
same tools can be used to create additional or alternative repositories for
publishing, or to assist in creating, testing and submitting metadata to the
f-droid.org repository, also known as
fdroiddata.

For documentation, please see https://f-droid.org/docs.

In the beginning, fdroidserver was the complete server-side setup that ran
f-droid.org. Since then, the website and other parts have been split out into
their own projects. The name for this suite of tooling has stayed
fdroidserver even though it no longer contains any proper server component.

Installing

There are many ways to install fdroidserver, including using a range of
package managers. All of the options are documented on the website:
https://f-droid.org/docs/Installing_the_Server_and_Repo_Tools

Releases

The production setup of fdroidserver for f-droid.org is run directly from the
master branch. This is put into production on an schedule (currently weekly).
So development and testing happens in the branches. We track branches using
merge requests. Therefore, there are many WIP and long-lived merge requests.

There are also stable releases of fdroidserver. This is mostly intended for
running custom repositories, where the build process is separate. It can also
be useful as a simple way to get started contributing packages to fdroiddata,
since the stable releases are available in package managers.

Tests

To run the full test suite:

tests/run-tests

To run the tests for individual Python modules, see the tests/test_*.py files, e.g.:

python -m unittest tests/test_metadata.py

It is also possible to run individual tests:

python -m unittest tests.test_metadata.MetadataTest.test_rewrite_yaml_special_build_params

There is a growing test suite that has good coverage on a number of key parts of
this code base. It does not yet cover all the code, and there are some parts
where the technical debt makes it difficult to write unit tests. New tests
should be standard Python unittest test cases. Whenever possible, the old
tests written in bash in tests/run-tests should be ported to Python.

This test suite has built over time a bit haphazardly, so it is not as clean,
organized, or complete as it could be. We welcome contributions. The goal is
to move towards standard Python testing patterns and to expand the unit test
coverage. Before rearchitecting any parts of it, be sure to contact
us to discuss the changes beforehand.

Additional tests for different linux distributions

These tests are also run on various configurations through GitLab CI. This is
only enabled for master@fdroid/fdroidserver because it takes longer to
complete than the regular CI tests. Most of the time you won’t need to worry
about them, but sometimes it might make sense to also run them for your merge
request. In that case you need to remove these lines from .gitlab-ci.yml
and push this to a new branch of your fork.

Alternatively run them
locally
like this: gitlab-runner exec docker ubuntu_lts

Documentation

The API documentation based on the docstrings gets automatically
published here on every commit
on the master branch.

It can be built locally via

pip install -e .[docs]
cd docs
sphinx-apidoc -o ./source ../fdroidserver -M -e
sphinx-autogen -o generated source/*.rst
make html

To additionally lint the code call

pydocstyle fdroidserver --count

When writing docstrings you should follow the
numpy style guide.

Translation

Everything can be translated. See
Translation and Localization
for more info.