Flatpak is generally advertised as the next-generation technology for building and distributing applications on Linux. The WPE maintainers leverage Flatpak to allow users to try two different WPE flavors.

Stable WPE releases

Stable releases are packaged and available through Flatpak. Users and WPE application developers can easily try the Cog WPE browser and even build new applications relying on the WPE Sdk provided through Flatpak.

Besides a working Flatpak setup you need to register the Igalia Flatpak repository in your Linux environment:

$ flatpak --user remote-add wpe-releases --from \
  https://software.igalia.com/flatpak-refs/wpe-releases.flatpakrepo

This repository contains binary builds of WPE for the x86_64 architecture and provides packages for Cog as well.

The current Cog/WPE stack still imposes the Wayland-only limitation, with Mesa-based graphics stacks most likely to work well. In future release, we plan to add support for new platforms, graphics stacks and methods of integration.

Cog

To install and run Cog, use the following commands:

$ flatpak --user install org.wpe.Cog
$ flatpak run org.wpe.Cog -P fdo <URL>

Sdk for application developers

Application developers can package their WPE application with Flatpak and basing the application upon the WPE Sdk runtime. The following flatpak-builder manifest snippet can be used to target the WPE Sdk:

runtime: org.wpe.Platform
runtime-version: stable
sdk: org.wpe.Sdk

More information is available on the Flatpak website regarding applications packaging.

Nightly WPE builds

To complement the six months release cycle, users interested in testing the latest development version of WPE can download it directly from the build bots using a Python script.

This is a convenient and easy way to test the bleeding edge version of WPE, exposing features that will be shipped in the next stable release.

To download and test nightly WPE builds, download the webkit-flatpak-run-nightly script and run it like this:

$ wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/WebKit/webkit/master/Tools/Scripts/webkit-flatpak-run-nightly
$ chmod +x webkit-flatpak-run-nightly
$ ./webkit-flatpak-run-nightly --wpe MiniBrowser <browser options or URL>

This script locally installs the WebKit Flatpak-based developer SDK in ~/.cache/wk-nightly and then downloads a zip archive of the build artefacts from the buildbot server. The downloaded zip file is unpacked in /tmp and kept around in case you want to run this again without re-downloading the build archive:

$ ./webkit-flatpak-run-nightly --wpe -p /tmp/wpewebkit-release-bXXXXX \
  MiniBrowser <browser options or URL>

Nightly builds are currently provided only for machines using the x86_64 architecture.

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