Developer Documentation

Setting up a development environment

To set up a development environment for BoxBuddy, you will need a Rust toolchain, make, and gettext.

You will also need Distrobox, as well as Podman (or docker).

Using Distrobox Assemble

BoxBuddy’s development environment can be spun up in a distrobox, using distrobox assemble. There is a file in the root of the project repo called boxbuddy-dev-environment.ini which can be passed to distrobox assemble like so:

distrobox assemble create --file boxbuddy-dev-environment.ini

Or using BoxBuddy itself, click the Hammer icon in the top-left of BoxBuddy’s header bar and choose the boxbuddy-dev-environment.ini file from the file-picker. Then open up the box by clicking the Open Terminal button to enter your development environment.

Manual Setup

You need the GTK4 and Libadwaita development packages, flatpak development packages, as well as make.

Fedora / openSUSE - gtk4-devel libadwaita-devel gettext-devel make flatpak-builder

Debian / Ubuntu - libgtk-4-dev libadwaita-1-dev gettext build-essential flatpak-builder

Arch - gtk4 libadwaita base-devel gettext flatpak-builder

You will also need Rust, probably via Rustup

Install stable Rust via:

rustup toolchain add stable
rustup component add clippy

Guidelines During Development

• Try to avoid adding external crates unless absolutely necessary
• Please run make lint before submitting changes
  • Please read and address any clippy warnings caused by your code additions, unless you can’t.
• I would recommend having Flatseal installed while developing, so you can test your changes with and without host/home filesystem access easily.
  • flatpak install flathub com.github.tchx84.Flatseal

Building and Running

Build and run the project by running make.

To test your changes as a flatpak, run make flatpak followed by flatpak install --user boxbuddy.flatpak.

Updating the Potfile (Translation Framework)

If you add any translatable strings (calls to gettext) please run make potfile to update the potfile.