AppStream Software & Library

Utilities to generate, maintain and access the AppStream Xapian database.

What is the AppStream software?

LibAppStream makes it easy to access component information from the AppStream database over a nice GObject-based interface. It uses a PackageKit plugin to automatically (re)generate the AppStream Xapian database of software components. The libappstream library can be used with a wide variety of programming languages (via GObject-Introspection). In combination with PackageKit in can be used to build software-centers. The software also provides a command-line tool to query the contents of the AppStream database. Additionally, the software will abstract some differences which exist between distributions in terms of providing metadata or handling things like screenshots, so you don't have to worry about this.

The AppStream libappstream API might still change a little during the development process. We will notify about any API/ABI breaks in the release notes. (But please keep that in mind when using it!)

Get it!

You can download the latest release at freedesktop.org/software/appstream/releases/

Documentation

Documentation for the AppStream project, including how to ship AppStream data with your distribution or upstream project, as well as libappstream API docs can be found on the documentation pages. These pages also include API documentation for libappstream.