Our First App

Launch-able, Build-able, and Shareable

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.

Hello (Again) World!

To create our first real app, we're going to re-use what we learned in the last chapter and build on that example.

1. Create a new project folder, including a new "src" folder and an Application.vala file

2. Create a Gtk.Application class with a Gtk.ApplicationWindow in the activate () function.

3. Add a new Gtk.Label to the window with the text "Hello Again World!"

4. 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:

src/Application.vala

/*
 * SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-3.0-or-later
 * SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2023 Your Name <[e-mail]>
 */
 
 public class MyApp : Gtk.Application {
    public MyApp () {
        Object (
            application_id: "com.github.yourusername.yourrepositoryname",
            flags: ApplicationFlags.FLAGS_NONE
        );
    }

    protected override void activate () {
        var label = new Gtk.Label ("Hello Again World!");
   
        var main_window = new Gtk.ApplicationWindow (this) {
            child = label,
            default_height = 300,
            default_width = 300,
            title = "Hello World"
        };
        main_window.present ();
    }

    public static int main (string[] args) {
        return new MyApp ().run (args);
    }
}

Build "Application.vala" just to make sure it all works. If something goes wrong here, feel free to refer back to the last chapter and remember to check your terminal output for any hints.

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:

git remote add origin [e-mail]:yourusername/yourrepositoryname.git
git push -u origin master

Everything working as expected? Good. Now, let's get our app ready for other people to use.

License

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 GNU General Public License (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 documentation for adding software licenses and add a LICENSE file to your repository.

If you'd like to better understand software licensing, the Linux Foundation offers a free online course on open source licensing

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.