Hi! I’m a Junior-level developer with a passion project I started on about a week ago, but I want to make sure this isn’t going to get me in trouble.
The big question:
Is pulling and displaying info from flathub.org on my own website allowed/legal?
What I’m doing:
I’m working on a website that keeps track how well linux apps work on linux phones (like the Pinephone mainly). It currently pulls from here to make a database of all flathub apps, and on my website you can give those apps grades for how well they work (does it fit on a phone screen, can it use the touch screen, does it even launch, etc).
For the baseline, I am aiming to get all linux apps from flathub, Debian, and Manjaro repos.
Below are some rough mockups of my progress so far if it helps illustrate what I’m going for:
I find it great when people make good use of public APIs to produce cool stuff.
It would be nice if you could share the code of your website and also briefly describe how you are consuming the API (how many calls are you making, whether you are caching results, etc…). As long as it isn’t abusive to our infra, I think nobody will oppose it. Giving us more details certainly will help your case.
I would be glad to share the source code, once its a bit more functional. I was going to look into how to post my source code as open-source somewhere like Github, maybe once I’ve achieved a base line of functionality
I’m pretty new to working with databases, so Im starting simple and will obviously expand functionality as I go. I have a python script that grabs the contents of https://flathub.org/api/v1/apps and saves it as a list of dictionaries.
I was thinking of grabbing this and updating my site’s database for changes to apps and what new apps have been added maybe once or twice a day.
with urlopen('https://flathub.org/api/v1/apps') as response: #get all apps & info from flathub.org
app_list = json.load(response) #convert info into List of Dicts
edit: I have not set up anything like caching or saving the app icons, so any instance on my pages of a picture is a link to the picture hosted on your servers. I forgot that’s the original thing I was asking about. That shouldn’t be an issue, right?
