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aperezdc / revolt

Better desktop integration for Riot.im (not only) for GNOME
GNU General Public License v3.0
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[query] How can I start flatpak-installed Revolt from the command line? #80

Closed lofidevops closed 6 years ago

lofidevops commented 6 years ago

User story: I am a software developer scripting my desktop environment. I have installed Revolt using flatpak. I want to start Revolt (unless it is already open) from a script, so that I can invoke this action along with others in a single script.

(Direct reciprocal to https://github.com/aperezdc/revolt/issues/71 :D If there's some common Flatpak/DBus interface I'm missing a link would be great.)

aperezdc commented 6 years ago

@kwill: You can check whether Revolt is running by pinging it via D-Bus:

gdbus call --session \
  --dest org.perezdecastro.Revolt \
  --object-path /org/perezdecastro/Revolt \
  --method org.freedesktop.DBus.Peer.Ping

If the D-Bus call succeeds and returns an empty tuple (), then Revolt is already running (as a matter of fact, the above works for many applications changing the object path and destination object). If you need to start Revolt, you can use:

flatpak run org.perezdecastro.Revolt

Another option would be making Revolt activatable over D-Bus, but the approach above does already work today.

lofidevops commented 6 years ago

It looks like the check is not necessary in this scenario (calling flatpak run twice doesn't create another instance of Revolt) - but it's great to see more of how dbus and flatpak/Revolt interact, thanks! Is there a standard API and/or a Revolt-specific API for these dbus interactions?

aperezdc commented 6 years ago

@kwill: That's true, thanks to using GApplication only a single instance of the application will run, so re-executing it will check for a previously launched instance and activate it.

This is the standard behavior of most programs which use GApplication, and is not Revolt-specific. Many of the basic D-Bus methods (like .Ping or .Activate) are provided automatically, and applications can also expose their own additional actions.