Contributing

Before developing features or fixing bugs, please make sure you are have done the following:

  • Your code is not on the main branch of your fork.

  • The code has been tested.

  • All commit messages are properly formatted and commits squashed where appropriate.

  • You have included updates to all appropriate documentation.

We use GitHub pull requests to review contributions. Please be kind and patient as code reviews can be long and minutious.

Development

XDG Desktop Portal usually 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

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