Our First App
Launch-able, Build-able, and Shareable
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Launch-able, Build-able, and Shareable
Last updated
Was this helpful?
In the previous chapter, we created a "Hello World!" app to show off our Vala and Gtk skills. But what if we wanted to share our new app with a friend? They'd have to know which packages to include with the valac
command we used to build our app, and after they'd built it they'd have to run it from the build directory like we did. Clearly, we need to do some more stuff to make our app fit for people to use, to make it a real app.
To create our first real app, we're going to re-use what we learned in and build on that example.
Create a new project folder, including a new "src" folder and an Application.vala file
Create a Gtk.Application
class with a Gtk.ApplicationWindow
in the activate ()
function.
Add a new Gtk.Label
to the window with the text "Hello Again World!"
Finally, this time we're going to prefix our file with a small legal header. Make sure this header matches the license of your code and assigns copyright to you. More info about this later.
The results should look like this:
Initialize a git branch, add your files to the project, and write a commit message using what you learned in the last chapter. Lastly, make sure you've created a new repository for your project on GitHub push your first revision with git
:
Everything working as expected? Good. Now, let's get our app ready for other people to use.
Next, we need a way to create a listing in AppCenter and a way to tell the interface to show our app in the Applications menu and dock: let's write some Metadata.
Build "Application.vala" just to make sure it all works. If something goes wrong here, feel free to refer back to and remember to check your terminal output for any hints.
Since we're going to be putting our app out into the wild, we should include some information about who wrote it and the legal usage of its source code. For this we need a new file in our project's root folder: the LICENSE
file. This file contains a copy of the license that your code is released under. For elementary OS apps this is typically the (GPL). Remember the header we added to our source code? That header reminds people that your app is licensed and it belongs to you. GitHub has a built-in way to add several popular licenses to your repository. Read their and add a LICENSE
file to your repository.
If you'd like to better understand software licensing, the Linux Foundation offers a