The F-Droid website is built using Jekyll and gitlab-ci. The whole website now works using a standard git “fork” workflow that is well supported by GitLab, and well known from services like GitHub. For all of the pages and information about apps and packages distributed by f-droid.org, those pages are generated using our jekyll-fdroid plugin, which takes the content from the f-droid.org index file.

Staging on development forks

All development forks of fdroid-website automatically have a staging server setup and maintained by the gitlab-ci configuration. This automatically deploys the content of the fork’s master branch to GitLab Pages. For example, nicoalt’s git fork is at https://gitlab.com/nicoalt/fdroid-website, and the master branch from that is automatically deployed to https://nicoalt.gitlab.io/fdroid-website.

Staging of the official website

Like with forks, the master branch of the main git repo for the website, https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroid-website, is automatically deployed to https://fdroid.gitlab.io/fdroid-website. That is the place to review the current state of the website before tagging a release.

Deploying to https://f-droid.org

When an update to the website is tested and ready to go, a release manager creates a PGP-signed release tag in the main git repo. The deploy server monitors the main git repo for new tags. When it sees a new tag, it first checks the PGP signature on the git tag using a manually configured GnuPG keyring that contains only the public keys of the PGP keys that are allowed to tag website releases.

After the git tag is verified, the f-droid.org target in .gitlab-ci.yml is run to generate the actual files for the site. Those files are then copied into place on the f-droid.org servers.

The deploy tags use a “semantic versioning” naming scheme:

• <major>.<minor>
• <minor> is incremented on each deployment
• <major> is only incremented when there are major changes