Tutorial: Writing Apps for FreedomBox

This tutorial covers writing an app for FreedomBox. FreedomBox is a pure blend of Debian with a web interface, that configures its apps. We shall discuss various aspects of building an app for FreedomBox, by creating an example app. The app that is discussed in the tutorial already available in FreedomBox so you can also study it’s full source code.

There are two parts to writing a FreedomBox app. First is to make sure that the app is available as a Debian package uploaded to its repositories. This is the majority of the work involved. However, if an app is already available in Debian repositories, the whole task is simplified.. The second part of writing an app for FreedomBox is to provide a thin web interface layer for configuring and managing the app. This is done by extending FreedomBox’s user interface to provide visibility to the app and to let the user control its operations in a highly simplified way. This layer is what we typically refer to as a ‘FreedomBox app’.

FreedomBox apps can either be distributed to the end user as part of FreedomBox Service (Plinth) source code by submitting the apps to the project or they can distributed independently. This tutorial covers writing an app that is meant to be distributed as part of FreedomBox Service (Plinth). However, writing independent FreedomBox apps is also very similar and most of this tutorial is applicable.

Note

The term App

The term app, in this tutorial, is used to mean multiple concepts. A service or an application available to end users in FreedomBox is a combination of Debian package and a web interface layer. The web interface layer is also called a FreedomBox app which is very similar to and built upon a Django application.