Building & Running

Normally, XDG Desktop Portal runs as a user session service, initialized on demand through D-Bus activation. It usually starts with the session though, as many desktop environments try to talk to XDG Desktop Portal on startup. XDG Desktop Portal initializes specific backends through D-Bus activation as well.

Building

To build XDG Desktop Portal, first make sure you have the build dependencies installed through your distribution’s package manager. With them installed, run:

meson setup . _build
meson compile -C _build

Some distributions install portal configuration files in /usr, while Meson defaults to the prefix /usr/local. If the portal configuration files in your distribution are in /usr/share/xdg-desktop-portal/portals, re-configure Meson using meson setup --reconfigure . _build --prefix /usr and compile again.

Running

XDG Desktop Portal needs to own the D-Bus name and replace the user session service that might already be running. To do so, run:

_build/src/xdg-desktop-portal --replace

If you are developing inside a toolbox container, you must use flatpak-spawn from flatpak-xdg-utils to run the service:

flatpak-spawn --host _build/src/xdg-desktop-portal --replace

You may need to restart backends after replacing XDG Desktop Portal (please replace [name] with the backend name, e.g. gnome or kde or wlr):

systemctl --user restart xdg-desktop-portal-[name].service

Testing

To execute the test suite present in XDG Desktop Portal, make sure you built it with -Dlibportal=enabled, and run:

meson test -C _build

Documentation

These instructions are for Fedora, where you will need these packages:

sudo dnf install json-glib-devel fuse3-devel gdk-pixbuf2-devel pipewire-devel python3-sphinx flatpak-devel python3-furo python-sphinxext-opengraph python-sphinx-copybutton

Then you can build the website with:

meson setup . _build -Ddocumentation=enabled
ninja -C _build

Then just load the build website into a browser of your choice from _build/doc/html/index.html