flaticron sends daily mail reminders about pending updates for applications and runtimes installed by Flatpak. It is similar to the tools apticron¹ for apt on Debian and porticron² for portage on Gentoo.

flaticron uses mailx(1) and assumes you have setup an MTA such as exim4 or postfix to send mail. The recommended setup is a satellite system with an external smarthost as mail relay.

Download the Debian package from the latest release and install it locally:

wget https://github.com/raimue/flaticron/releases/download/v0.1/flaticron_0.1_all.deb
sudo apt install ./flaticron_0.1_all.deb

Install dependencies:

# Build dependencies
sudo apt install git
# Runtime dependencies
sudo apt install flatpak bash

Install flaticron:

git clone https://github.com/raimue/flaticron.git
cd flaticron
sudo make install

If you use the recommended system-wide installation, no special setup is necessary. Make sure you receive mail for the user root by configuring your address in /etc/aliases accordingly. As an alternative, set the mail address for your user in the config file at /etc/flaticron/flaticron.conf.

For automatic daily update checks, enable the systemd timer in the system-wide installation:

sudo systemctl enable --now flaticron.timer

For a manual run, just run the flaticron script to send a mail. Alternatively, use the --stdout argument on command line to view the report directly in your terminal:

flaticron --stdout

If you prefer flatpak --user, you can configure the email address for your user in the config file in ~/.config/flaticron/flaticron.conf. Otherwise it will be delivered to the local mailbox,

EMAIL="[email protected]"

Then enable the systemd timer unit for your user session:

systemctl --user enable --now flaticron.timer

If you are using custom Flatpak installations with flatpak --installation=extra, you can also enable system-wide systemd timers with template units.

To enable the systemd timer unit for a custom installation named "extra":

sudo systemctl enable --now [email protected]

The systemd timers as provided with flaticron run once a day by default. If you prefer classic cron over systemd, you can also add a manual command to the crontab:

flaticron
  --config <file>      Read this additional config file
  --stdout             Print the report to standard output instead of sending mail
  --user               Show only pending updates for user installation
  --system             Show only pending updates for system installation
  --installation=NAME  Show only pending updates for a non-default system-wide installation
  --help               Show this help text

By default, flaticron operates the same as flatpak and reports pending updates for both the system and user installation. If you install applications and runtimes to the Flatpak user installation, simply run the command as your own user. If you use the recommended system-wide installation, you can run the flaticron command from your crontab or use the provided systemd units.

flaticron is configured with builtin defaults, which can be overriden from the following configuration files. They are read in this order, in which later files may override earlier options:

• /etc/flaticron/flaticron.conf
• ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME}/flaticron/flaticron.conf (by default $HOME/.config/flaticron/flaticron.conf)

Look at the system-wide file for the detailed description of available options.

While this repository contains supporting files to package flaticron for Debian, it can also be used on any other distribution. You are welcome to package flaticron for your Linux distribution of choice.

flaticron is published under the same license as the Flatpak framework. See COPYING for the full license text.

SPDX-License-Identifier: LGPL-2.1-or-later