Adding shared library dependencies to Flatpak

[lawmurray]

I’m trying to add a shared library dependency to a flatpak build but cannot get it to work. It seems like I must be missing something simple. Minimal example in this GitHub repo but reproduced below. The dependency is libportal.

I have the following manifest:

id: com.example.example
runtime: org.gnome.Platform
runtime-version: '47'
sdk: org.gnome.Sdk
command: example

finish-args:
  - --share=ipc
  - --device=dri
  - --socket=wayland
  - --socket=fallback-x11

modules:

  - name: libportal
    buildsystem: meson
    sources:
      - type: git
        url: https://github.com/flatpak/libportal
        tag: 0.9.0

  - name: example
    buildsystem: meson
    sources:
      - type: dir
        path: .

The meson.build for the main module is:

project('example', 'c',
          version: '0.1.0',
    meson_version: '>= 1.0.0',
  default_options: [ 'warning_level=2', 'werror=false', 'c_std=gnu11', ],
)

executable('example', 'example.c', dependencies: [dependency('libportal')])

with a trivial example.c source file. I then run:

flatpak-builder --user --force-clean --install builddir com.example.example.yaml

which builds libportal etc, but when it comes to building the main module, meson gives:

../meson.build:7:29: ERROR: Dependency "libportal" not found, tried pkgconfig and cmake

I’m not sure this is specific to libportal or just any shared library.

What do I do to make sure that dependencies that are installed as earlier modules can be found when building the main module?

[bbhtt]

What version of flatpak-builder is this? You need 1.4.4.

[lawmurray]

Thanks for the response @bbhtt! This is 1.4.2 (on Ubuntu 24.04). Let me try a later version then.

[bbhtt]

Remove .flatpak-builder before retrying with newer flatpak-builder.

[lawmurray]

Upgrading to 1.4.4 fixed it, so simple one in the end, thanks again for your help!

[lawmurray]

To add some more information for others straying this way, it looks to me like /app/lib64 became /app/lib in the sandbox between versions 1.4.2 and 1.4.4. That may break other things, for example I’m needing the dconf backend for GSettings, so had --env=GIO_EXTRA_MODULES=/app/lib64/gio/modules/ set in finish-args of the Flatpak manifest. That now needs to be --env=GIO_EXTRA_MODULES=/app/lib/gio/modules/.