template-package-listing

VPM Package Listing Template

Starter for making your own Package Listings, including automation for building and publishing them.

Once you’re all set up, you’ll be able to update the source.json file, and generate a listing which works in the VPM for delivering updates for all the listed packages.

▶ Getting Started

• Press to start a new GitHub project based on this template, and follow the directions there.
  • Choose a fitting repository name and description.
  • Set the visibility to ‘Public’. You can also choose ‘Private’ and change it later.
  • You don’t need to select ‘Include all branches.’
• Edit this project on GitHub in your web browser, or clone it repository locally using Git.
  • If you’re unfamiliar with Git and GitHub, [visit GitHub’s documentation](https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/quickstart/

Setting up the Automation

You’ll need to edit some of the files in this template, starting with source.json:

• Fill out general information about your listing, such as the name, id, author, description, etc.
• Make sure to update the “url” field on line 4, replacing “vrchat-community” with your GitHub username, and “template-package-listing” with your repo name. This is the link that will be used to download your listing once it’s published by GitHub. For example, the user “thupper” who made a repo called “thupper-listing” would update the url to “https://thupper.github.io/thupper-listing/index.json”.
• Update the “url” within “infoLink” (on line 11) with the url of this new repo you’ve created.
• If you’d like to include packages hosted on GitHub, specify them in githubRepos.
• If you’d like to include packages hosted elsewhere as a .zip file, specify them in packages.
  • You can safely remove either githubRepos or packages if you’re not using them.
• Finally, go to the “Settings” page for your repo, then choose “Pages”, and look for the heading “Build and deployment”. Change the “Source” dropdown from “Deploy from a branch” to “GitHub Actions”.

📃 Rebuilding the Listing

Whenever you make a change to the main branch, or when you trigger it manually, the ‘Build Repo Listing’ action will make a new index of all the releases available and publish them as a website hosted fore free on GitHub Pages. This listing can be used by the VPM to keep your package up to date, and the generated index page can serve as a simple landing page with info for your package. The URL for your package will be in the format https://username.github.io/repo-name.

🏠 Customizing the Landing Page

The contents of the Website directory can be customized to change the appearance of the landing page. Most of the information will be automatically filled in with information from source.json. Customizing the landing page by hand is not required.

Technical Stuff

You are welcome to make your own changes to the automation process to make it fit your needs, and you can create Pull Requests if you have some changes you think we should adopt. Here’s some more info on the included automation:

Build Listing

build-listing.yml

This is a composite action which builds a vpm-compatible Repo Listing based on the items you’ve added to your source.json file. you’ve created. In order to find all your releases and combine them into a listing, it checks out another repository which has a Nuke project which includes the VPM core lib to have access to its types and methods. This project will be expanded to include more functionality in the future - for now, the action just calls its BuildRepoListing target, which calls RebuildHomePage when it completes. If you wanted to make an action that just rebuilds the home page, you could call that directly instead - just copy the existing call and replace the target names.