anycubic-slicer-next-flatpak

Unofficial Flatpak packaging for Anycubic Slicer Next, distro-independent (works on any Linux with Flatpak support). Anycubic only ships the slicer as a proprietary .deb for Ubuntu 24.04; this project downloads the official package and repackages it as a Flatpak.

Sibling project: anycubic-slicer-next-flake, a Nix flake doing the same job for NixOS specifically.

Status: builds and runs locally via flatpak-builder, and publishes to a hosted, updatable Flatpak repository via GitHub Actions (see below). See PLAN.md for the architecture and NOTES.md for known upstream bugs and how they're worked around.

Installing from the published repo

This repo only hosts the app itself, not the org.gnome.Platform//50 runtime it depends on -- that comes from Flathub, so Flathub has to be added as a remote too (most desktops already have it; the command below is a no-op if so):

flatpak remote-add --user --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
flatpak remote-add --user --if-not-exists anycubic-slicer-next-flatpak \
  https://roccorakete.github.io/anycubic-slicer-next-flatpak/index.flatpakrepo
flatpak install --user anycubic-slicer-next-flatpak io.github.roccorakete.AnycubicSlicerNext

Updates land via the normal flatpak update -- no manual re-download needed, unlike the .flatpak bundle route below.

Building and running locally

flatpak install --user flathub org.gnome.Sdk//50 org.gnome.Platform//50
flatpak-builder --user --install --force-clean build-dir \
  io.github.roccorakete.AnycubicSlicerNext.yml
flatpak run --user io.github.roccorakete.AnycubicSlicerNext

Building a distributable .flatpak bundle

For handing the app to someone directly (no repo hosting, no GitHub Pages/CI) rather than installing it into your own local flatpak-builder output, use build-bundle.sh:

./build-bundle.sh

This produces dist/anycubic-slicer-next.flatpak, a single file the recipient installs with:

flatpak install --user anycubic-slicer-next.flatpak

The script passes --runtime-repo=https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo to flatpak build-bundle -- do not drop this flag. Without it, the bundle has no record of where org.gnome.Platform//50/org.gnome.Sdk//50 come from, and flatpak install fails on any machine that doesn't already have Flathub configured as a remote (see NOTES.md).

CI: build, version, and publish

build-and-publish.yml does three things:

• Version: on a weekly schedule, update-anycubic-slicer.sh checks Anycubic's own apt repo for a newer .deb. If found, it bumps the manifest's url/sha256 pin, prepends an <release> entry to the AppStream metadata (version + the .deb's own build date, not "today"), commits, tags the commit vX.Y.ZZ, and pushes -- which triggers the next step. tests/update-script.sh runs first: an offline regression test of the update script against fixture Packages indexes (needs python3; see NOTES.md #9).
• Build: on every push to main that touches the manifest/patch/wrapper/desktop files (or via manual workflow_dispatch), installs flatpak/flatpak-builder/the GNOME 50 SDK fresh on a bare runner (rather than depending on a specific prebuilt container tag existing, see NOTES.md #7) and builds + signs the repository with andyholmes/flatter.
• Publish: uploads the signed repo to GitHub Pages, builds a standalone signed anycubic-slicer-next.flatpak bundle (same as build-bundle.sh produces locally), and creates/updates a GitHub Release tagged vX.Y.ZZ with that bundle attached -- an alternative for people who'd rather download a file than flatpak remote-add.

One-time setup (already done for this repo, documented for reference / key rotation)

1. Generate a signing key: gpg --batch --passphrase '' --quick-gen-key "<uid>" default default never
2. Add the exported private key as the GPG_SIGN_KEY repo secret: gpg --armor --export-secret-key <fingerprint> | gh secret set GPG_SIGN_KEY
3. Publish the public key in the repo for manual verification (signing-key.gpg.asc): gpg --armor --export <fingerprint> > signing-key.gpg.asc
4. Enable GitHub Pages with "GitHub Actions" as the source: gh api repos/<owner>/<repo>/pages -X POST -f build_type=workflow
5. Delete the private key material from local disk once the secret is uploaded -- only the GPG_SIGN_KEY secret and this repo's signing-key.gpg.asc need to persist.

License

The slicer itself is closed-source software by Anycubic. This project contains none of the slicer's code — it downloads the official .deb from Anycubic's CDN at build time.