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Contributing

Termux is an open source application and it is built on users' contributions. However, most of work is done by Termux maintainers on their spare time and therefore only priority tasks are being completed.

Developer's wiki is available at https://github.com/termux/termux-packages/wiki.

How you can contribute to Termux project

  • Reporting issues

    If you have found issue, let the community know about it.

    Please be prepared that issue may not be resolved immediately. We will ignore statements like "solve it quickly", "urgently need solution" and so on. Be patient.

    Avoid digging and commenting in old, already closed issues. Read them carefully - likely they already give solution. If it didn't worked, only then open a new one. Note that we will lock down issues that are really outdated.

    You may report only issues happening within our official packages. Do not submit issues happening in third-party software - we will ignore them.

    Bugs reports for legacy Termux installations (Android 5.x / 6.x) are not accepted. We already dropped support for these Android OS versions.

  • Examining existing packages for potential issues

    There could be undiscovered bugs in packages. For example: unspecified dependencies, unprefixed hardcoded FHS paths, crashes, etc.

    If you can't submit a pull request with patches fixing the problem, you can open new issue.

  • Fixing known bugs

    Take a look at https://github.com/termux/termux-packages/issues. There many issue tickets having tag bug report or help wanted. They all are waiting to be resolved.

  • Submitting new packages

    There are lots of unresolved package requests. Pay attention to tickets having tag help wanted.

  • Keeping existing packages up-to-date

    Packages do not update themselves on their own. Someone needs to update build script and patches. Usually they are handled by maintainers but things are often outdated.

    See Updating packages for details.

  • Hosting a package repository mirror

    Termux generates lots of traffic. Mirrors help to reduce load on primary server, provide better download speeds and eliminate single point of failure.

  • Donate

    See https://github.com/termux/termux-packages/wiki/Donate for details.

Requesting new package

If you are looking for specific package and didn't find it included in our repositories, you can request it.

Open a new issue filling the package request template. You will need to provide at least package description and its home page and URL to source repository. Remember that your request will not be processed immediately.

Requested package must comply with our packaging policy.

Packaging policy

There are already more than 1000 packages added to Termux repositories. All of them needs to be maintained, kept up-to-date. Unlike the major distributions, our developers team is small and we also limited on server disk space.

In order to provide service at reasonable quality, requested packages should met these conditions:

  • Packages must be active, well-known projects

    Software available in major Linux distributions has more chances to be included into Termux repositories. We will not accept outdated, dead projects as well as projects which do not have active community.

  • Packages must be licensed under widely recognized open source license

    Software should be licensed under Apache, BSD, GNU GPL, MIT or other well known open source license. Software which is open source but is distributed under non-free conditions is processed on individual basis.

    Software which is either closed-source, contain binary-only components or is distributed under End User License Agreement is not accepted.

  • Not installable through cpan, gem, npm, or pip

    These packages should be installable through cpan, gem, npm, pip and so on.

    Packaging modules for Perl, Ruby, Node.js, Python is problematic, especially when it comes to cross-compiling native extensions.

  • Not taking too much disk space

    The size of resulting package should be less than 100 MiB.

    Since software is being compiled for 4 CPU architectures (aarch64, arm, i686, x86_64), effective disk usage is 4 times bigger than size of single .deb file. We are limited on disk space and prefer many small packages over one big.

    Exceptions are made on individual basis and only for packages providing important functionality.

  • Not serving duplicated functionality

    Please avoid submitting packages which duplicate functionality of already present ones.

    The more useless packages in repositories, the less overall packaging and service quality - remembering that our resources are limited?

  • Not serving hacking, phishing, spamming, spying, ddos functionality

    We do not accept packages which serve solely destructive or privacy violation purposes, including but not limited to pentesting, phishing, bruteforce, sms/call bombing, DDoS attaks, OSINT.

Submitting pull requests

Contributors take the all responsibility for their submissions. Maintainers may provide some help with fixing your pull request or give some recommendations, but that DOES NOT mean they will do all work instead of you.

Minimal requirements:

If you never used Linux distribution or Termux was your first experience with Linux environment, we strongly recommending to NOT send pull requests since we will reject low quality work.

Do not forget about packaging policy when submitting a new package, as your pull request will be closed without merge.

Do not send disruptive changes, like without reason reverting commits or deleting files, creating spam content, etc. Authors of such pull requests may be blocked from contributing to Termux project.

Working with packages

All software available in Termux repositories aims to be compatible with Android OS and is built by Android NDK. This often introduces compatibility issues as Android (specifically Termux) is not a standard platform. Do not expect there are exist package recipes available out-of-box.

Basics

Each package is a defined through the build.sh script placed into directory ./packages/<name>/ where <name> is the actual name of package in lower case. File build.sh is a shell (Bash) script that defines some properties like dependencies, description, home page through environment variables. Sometimes it also used to override default packaging steps defined in our build system.

Here is example of build.sh:

TERMUX_PKG_HOMEPAGE=https://example.com
TERMUX_PKG_DESCRIPTION="Termux package"
TERMUX_PKG_LICENSE="GPL-3.0"
TERMUX_PKG_MAINTAINER="@github"
TERMUX_PKG_VERSION=1.0
TERMUX_PKG_SRCURL=https://example.com/sources-${TERMUX_PKG_VERSION}.tar.gz
TERMUX_PKG_SHA256=0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
TERMUX_PKG_DEPENDS="libiconv, ncurses"

It can contain some additional variables:

  • TERMUX_PKG_BUILD_IN_SRC=true

    Use this variable if package supports in-tree builds only, for example if package uses raw Makefile instead of build system like CMake.

  • TERMUX_PKG_PLATFORM_INDEPENDENT=true

    This variable specifies that package is platform-independent and can run on any device regardless of CPU architecture.

TERMUX_PKG_LICENSE should specify the license using SPDX license identifier or can contain values "custom" or "non-free". Multiple licenses should be separated by commas.

TERMUX_PKG_SRCURL should contain URL only for the official source bundle. Use of forks is allowed only under a good reason.

More about build.sh variables you can read on developer's wiki.

Updating packages

asciicast

You can check which packages are out-of-date by visiting Termux page on Repology.

General package update procedure

Usually to update packages you need to just modify few variables and commit the changes.

  1. Assign the new version value to TERMUX_PKG_VERSION. Be careful to not remove the epoch (numbered prefix, e.g 1:, 2:) accidentally.
  2. If there is TERMUX_PKG_REVISION variable set, remove it. Revision should be set only for subsequent package builds within the same version.
  3. Download the source code archive and compute SHA-256 checksum: 
    cd ./packages/${YOUR_PACKAGE}
(source build.sh 2>/dev/null; curl -LO "$TERMUX_PKG_SRCURL")
  4. Assign the new checksum value to TERMUX_PKG_SHA256.

Dealing with patch errors

Major changes introduced to packages often make current patches incompatible with newer package version. Unfortunately, there no universal guide about fixing patch issues as workaround is always based on changes introduced to the new source code version.

Here are few things you may to try:

  1. If patch fixing particular known upstream issue, check the project's VCS for commits fixing the issue. There is a chance that patch is no longer needed.

  2. Inspecting the failed patch file and manually applying changes to source code. Do so only if you understand the source code and changes introduced by patch.

    Regenerate patch file, e.g. with:

    diff -uNr package-1.0 package-1.0.mod > previously-failed-patch-file.patch

Always check the CI (Github Actions) status for your pull request. If it fails, then either fix or close it. Maintainers can fix it on their own, if issues are minor. But they won't rewrite whole your submission.

Rebuilding package with no version change

Changes to patch files and build configuration options will imply package rebuild. In order to make package recognized as update, a build number should be set. This is done through defining variable TERMUX_PKG_REVISION or incrementing its value if already set.

TERMUX_PKG_REVISION should be set exactly below TERMUX_PKG_VERSION:

TERMUX_PKG_VERSION=1.0
TERMUX_PKG_REVISION=4

If package version has been updated, TERMUX_PKG_REVISION should be removed.

Downgrading the package or changing versioning scheme

If package needs to be downgraded or for versioning scheme needs to be changed, you need to set or increment package epoch. This is needed to tell package manager force recognize new version as package update.

Epoch should be specified in same variable as version (TERMUX_PKG_VERSION), but its value will take different format ({EPOCH}:{VERSION}):

TERMUX_PKG_VERSION=1:5.0.0

Note that if you are not @termux collaborator, pull request must contain a description why you are submitting a package downgrade. All pull requests which submit package downgrading without any serious reason will be rejected.

Common build issues

No files in package. Maybe you need to run autoreconf -fi before configuring?

Means that build system cannot find the Makefile. Depending on project, there are some tips for trying:

  • Set TERMUX_PKG_BUILD_IN_SRC=true - applicable to Makefile-only projects.
  • Run ./autogen.sh or autoreconf -fi in termux_step_pre_configure. This is applicable to projects that use Autotools.
No LICENSE file was installed for ...

This error happens when build system cannot find license file and it should be specified manually through TERMUX_PKG_LICENSE_FILE.