appfair.net

The App Fair Project catalog site. Aggregates every published app in the appfair GitHub org into a single landing page, with a per-app sub-page for each one — generated from the appindex.json that each app's release pipeline ships.

How it works

1. scripts/aggregate.mjs lists every repository in the appfair GitHub org via the API, keeps only the forks (which is how App Fair catalogues each app — e.g. appfair/Net-Skip is a fork of Net-Skip/Net-Skip), fetches https://github.com/appfair/<repo>/releases/latest/download/appindex.json from each, and merges them. The result is written to two places:

   • site/appindex.json — build input for the appland template (multi-app mode).
   • site/public/appindex.v1.json — copy that ships with the static site, downloadable from https://appfair.net/appindex.v1.json.

   Forks whose latest release doesn't yet publish an appindex.json are silently skipped.

2. The appfair/appland Astro template is checked out into site/appland.

3. astro build reads site/siteinfo.yaml and site/appindex.json and emits a localized landing page at /{locale}/ plus per-app pages at /{locale}/apps/{repo}/.

4. scripts/fdroid-mirror.mjs derives the curated F-Droid repository (see fdroid/README.md): it filters the official https://f-droid.org/repo/index-v2.json down to the ~100 reproducible, upstream-signed, well-known apps in fdroid/curated.yaml (which also defines the star-ranked default sort order published as the index's top-level rank array), and scripts/fdroid-sign.sh signs the result F-Droid-style with the repo key held in GitHub secrets. Served at https://appfair.net/repo/ (add-repo URL: https://appfair.net/repo?fingerprint=…). APK binaries are not mirrored — clients download them from the official f-droid.org mirror pool and verify them against the sha256 in our signed index.

5. .github/workflows/aggregate.yml runs the above hourly on a cron.

Layout

appfair.net/
├── .github/workflows/aggregate.yml   # hourly poll + build + deploy
├── scripts/aggregate.mjs             # GH org → site/appindex.json
├── scripts/fdroid-mirror.mjs         # f-droid.org index → curated site/public/repo/
├── scripts/fdroid-sign.sh            # entry.json → signed entry.jar
├── fdroid/
│   ├── curated.yaml                  # the curated ~100-app subset, star-ranked
│   └── README.md                     # criteria, key setup, caveats
└── site/
    ├── siteinfo.yaml                 # template config (title, host, etc.)
    ├── public/                       # static files copied into the build
    │   ├── appindex.v1.json          # generated copy — served at /appindex.v1.json
    │   └── repo/                     # generated F-Droid repo; gitignored
    ├── appindex.json                 # generated build input; gitignored
    └── appland/                      # template; gitignored, fetched in CI

Local development

If you have the appland template checked out as a sibling of this repo (i.e. ../appland/ exists), the quickest path is:

scripts/dev.sh

That script aggregates the catalog, mirrors ../appland/ into site/appland/ (preserving node_modules between runs so subsequent launches are fast), copies site/public/ into the template, runs npm install the first time only, and starts astro dev at http://localhost:4321/.

If the template isn't checked out locally, run the steps manually:

# 1. Aggregate the catalog (writes site/appindex.json)
node scripts/aggregate.mjs

# 2. Vendor the template
git clone https://github.com/appfair/appland site/appland

# 3. Run the dev server
cd site/appland
npm install
npm run dev

License

CC0 1.0 Universal — see LICENSE.