Rough guide on making an F-Droid Repo

Using GithubUserContent

I believe this method gives you around ~100GB of repo space but results in an odd quirk where visiting the repo’s URL gives an 404: Not found error.

• Create a new github repo, the name can be arbitrary.
• Rename the main/master branch to fdroid
• If you’re using Nix, copy the shell.nix from this repo and run nix-shell, then fdroid init. If you’re not using Nix you’ve got to setup your environment yourself.
• Use the .gitignore from this repo to prevent uploading the keys to the castle.
• Copy your APKs to the repo directory, they must be under 100MB. Avoid the free tier of Github’s LFS unless your repo can fit in the meager limits.
• Edit the config.yml, specifically setting the repo name and URL. It won’t work without this! The URL should look something like https://raw.githubusercontent.com/alt-droid/alt-droid-foss/fdroid/repo where alt-droid is your user/org name, alt-droid-foss is your repository’s name, fdroid is your branch name and repo is the folder your repo is hosted.
• Run fdroid update --create-metadata and edit the skeleton metadata yml files in the metadata directory to your liking.
• Nearly done now, do a final fdroid update and simply git add ., git commit, git push your repo.
• Now to make a nice README.md or some other site to guide users how to install the repo.

Using Github Pages

This method is a bit nicer in that it has a nice landing page when the URL is visited, but I believe the Github Pages limit for free accounts is only ~1GB, so this is only suitable for smaller repositories.

• Create a new github repo, call it fdroid and cd into it.
• If you’re using Nix, copy the shell.nix from this repo and run nix-shell, then fdroid init. If you’re not using Nix you’ve got to setup your environment yourself.
• Use the .gitignore from this repo to prevent uploading the keys to the castle.
• Use the default configuration for deploying github pages through github actions.
• Copy your APKs to the repo directory, they must be under 100MB. Avoid the free tier of Github’s LFS unless your repo can fit in the meager limits.
• Edit the config.yml file, specifically setting a repo name and github pages URL. It won’t work without this!
• Run fdroid update --create-metadata and edit the skeleton metadata yml files in the metadata directory to your liking.
• Nearly done now, do a final fdroid update and run the github action to launch your static site.

Resources

Discovery

You can search itch by license, i.e. https://itch.io/games/code-gpl2/platform-android

All the Pixel Dungeon Forks: https://github.com/Dominowood371/Pixel-Dungeon

Metadata

• Build Metadata Reference
• List of Licenses