GNOME Software is often where users will first come into contact with an application which they might later install, so the impression the user gets of that application is important. Application developers want to see how their application will appear in GNOME Software, and to have some control over it.
GNOME Software provides some tools to help with this.
If there is a supported tool which is not in this document, please submit a merge request to document it.
The information about an application comes from its metainfo (or, as it was previously known: appdata) file. Metainfo files for multiple applications are concatenated into ‘appstream’ files. Almost all of the customisation which GNOME Software provides for applications comes from information in metainfo or appstream files.
So the first thing to check for your application is that its metainfo file is complete and valid. See the metainfo file specification.
To validate your metainfo file, run
appstreamcli validate /path/to/app.metainfo.xml
You can add this as a unit test to your application by adding the following to
the appropriate meson.build in your application:
metainfo_file = files('com.example.MyApp.metainfo.xml')
appstreamcli = find_program('appstreamcli', required: false)
if appstreamcli.found()
test (
'Validate metainfo file',
appstreamcli,
args: ['validate', '--no-net', metainfo_file],
)
endif
The context tiles which are shown on an application’s details page in GNOME Software are derived from the application’s metainfo.
There’s more detailed information about them, and the information they are built from, on the GNOME Software wiki.
GNOME Software allows previewing how an application will appear, by loading its metainfo file directly. This allows previewing in-progress changes to an application without publishing it to a repository.
Do this with the --show-metainfo argument:
gnome-software --show-metainfo=/path/to/app.metainfo.xml,icon=/path/to/icon.png
This will show the application in the details page of GNOME Software, and will also display it in the featured carousel on the overview page.