Flatpak package for Linux

[rugk]

It would be nice if you could publish this as a flatpak on flathub e.g.

Flatpaks are a new software distribution mechanism for Linux distros, can thus installed on any distro and are easy to update.

Here is how to get started.

┆Issue is synchronized with this Jira Task

[lolrepeatlol]

Would it be possible to have a Flatpak be a VPN since it's sandboxed?

[rugk]

I'm not sure and very likely depends on how it's done and how it integrates into the system. Online I could only find https://linuxpunx.com/2021/04/05/flatpak-and-whatip/, which seems to indicate it can at least have access to the network interfaces.

[andersk]

FYI, I’m packaging mozillavpn for Nix at NixOS/nixpkgs#147975. (Nix is unrelated to Flatpak, but satisfies a similar sort of use case: it installs on any Linux distro without relying on or interfering with system packages.)

[HiruNya]

I tried my hand at this but unfortunately I got stuck at the requirement for PolKit which doesn't seem to be supported (that link is from a while ago so I'm not sure if anything has changed since then). I don't know enough about how a VPN and PolKit work so I gave up :sweat_smile: . Depending on what Mozilla VPN needs root privileges for, you might be able to replace it with Portals.

[oskirby]

I think we can work around the use of Polkit by explicitly requesting permissions to access the D-Bus name org.mozilla.vpn but unfortunately I don't think that would be enough for a flatpak build of the VPN client. We currently require root permissions to run a D-Bus service that manipulates routing and the network interfaces, which would break in a Flatpak sandbox.

[ahjolinna]

any hope? or is this dead/abandoned? (would like to see this for my SUSE's MicroOS ...or other immutable distros)

[herzenschein]

I've been testing the current flatpak based on 6.6 and it works well.

In case others aren't aware of this, you can build the flatpak by navigating to the linux/flatpak folder and either:

# Building in one go
flatpak-builder build --install-deps-from=flathub --force-clean --ccache --install org.mozilla.vpn.yml
# Building the flatpak manually
flatpak-builder flatpak-build-dir --force-clean --install-deps-from flathub --repo=mozillavpn-master org.mozilla.vpn.yml
flatpak-builder --run flatpak-build-dir org.mozilla.vpn.yml mozillavpn # This just tests whether the flatpak runs
flatpak build-bundle mozillavpn-master mozillavpn.flatpak org.mozilla.vpn
sudo flatpak install mozillavpn.flatpak

I've noticed however that if you install the flatpak as --user it keeps requesting Polkit for the password every once in a while, which is fairly annoying.

Could we get some collaboration from the Flatpak folks and from the KDE SDK folks to resolve the remaining issues? :>