Advice on integrating apps

Feb 11, 2021
B

I’m one of the maintainers of the ZAP flatpak on flathub. A major part of the functionality is the ability to open a web browser via a button in the GUI. For the sake of this conversation, let’s say the browser that’s trying to be opened is firefox. After a normal install, clicking the “firefox” button in the GUI results in Firefox opening because the app can access the system binary for Firefox. With the flatpak version though, how do I achieve this? Would I want to expose the system binary, install the firefox flatpak package or something completely different?

I’m keen to hear a how to, not short answers to this.

H

Use flatpak-spawn to launch a program outside of the sandbox.

B

You should use the OpenURI portal https://flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-portal/portal-docs.html#gdbus-method-org-freedesktop-portal-OpenURI.OpenURI

B
Replying to #2

can you provide an example how to package this functionality?