App Template

Basic example

This is what most apps actually need/want to provide. Upload your builds directly to your GitHub release, no zips. Put screenshots as PNG in /docs/assets/images/screenshots/[slug] (400x480; no screen gap, 1x resolution, ideally with the left and right of the bottom screen cut out to transparency and optimized) if desired.

Create this at /source/apps/[slug].json. Your app's slug is the title, all lowercase, no 'special' characters, with spaces to -. ("My Cool App" -> "my-cool-app.json")

{
	"github": "yourname/myproject",
	"systems": ["3DS"],
	"categories": ["game"],
	"unique_ids": [123456],
	"image": "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/yourname/myproject/main/meta/banner.png",
	"icon": "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/yourname/myproject/main/meta/icon.png",
	"long_description": "This is a *really* cool app!",
}

• systems: DS and/or 3DS
• categories: Any combination ofgame, emulator, app, utility, save-tool, firm, luma3ds do not just make up new categories, but you can make suggestions
• unique_ids: This is the UniqueId value in your .rsf file, but in decimal JSON will not take hexadecimal
• image: Preferably a 3DS CIA banner image, but any large(ish) image to show on the website, can be omitted and the icon will be used
• icon: Preferably a 32x32 (DS) or 48x48 (3DS) icon, but any small preferably square icon can work, falls back to your profile picture if omitted

Complex example

{
	"github": "yourname/myproject",
	"author": "Me",
	"title": "My Cool Project",
	"description": "This is a cool project for 3DS",
	"website": "https://yourname.example/myproject",
	"systems": ["3DS"],
	"categories": ["game"],
	"unique_ids": [123456],
	"download_filter": "-(3ds|nds)\\.zip",
	"image": "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/yourname/myproject/main/meta/banner.png",
	"icon": "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/yourname/myproject/main/meta/icon.png",
	"long_description": "This is a really cool app, you can even put *Markdown* here!",
	"autogen_scripts": true,
	"script_message": "This will be shown at the end of the script if auto-generated.\n\nDo not use this unless you have very important info.",
	"scripts": {... see below ...},
	"archive": {... see below ...}
}

Only necessary items should be included, remove all unnecessary items. I think I included everything remotely common here, but anything that gets scraped can be overridden here, if you should need to.

• github: Required (assuming the app is on GitHub, search the repo for BitBucket and GitLab examples), completely manually filled apps are supported, but git repos are strongly preferred
• author: Autofilled from your GitHub name (not username), only fill if different
• title: Autofilled from the GitHub repos name, only fill if different
• description: Autofilled from GitHub repo description, shown in Universal-Updater, only fill if different
• website: Effectively defaults to your GitHub repo
• download_filter: U-DB tries to exclude all unwanted files with a blacklist, but if you have something falling through that put a whitelist regex here
• autogen_scripts: only useful if true, makes U-DB still automatically generate more scripts even if you have a manual script, niche but useful if you have say a 3DSX in a folder and a CIA directly (plz dont do that, but a lot of old apps did)

Advanced features

Archives

This exists as a simpler way to extract files from a zip. Again, I suggest not using zips it usually slows things down on 3DS. This supports some rather advanced regex (see Angband) and extracting multiple files (see 3DSController). Note that files will only be extracted per default rules, if you also need to specific custom locations then use a script.

	"archive": {
		"myapp.zip": { // Name of the GitHub artifact
			"myapp.3dsx": [ // Name to display in Universal-Updater
				"myapp.3dsx" // Path within the zip
			],
			"myapp.cia": [ // Name to display in Universal-Updater
				"myapp.cia" // Path within the zip
			]
		}
	}

Scripts

I strongly recommend uploading your CIA, 3DSX, NDS files individually as Universal-DB's scripts will handle everything automatically, no scripts at all! If you need support files, you'll need a custom script. See the Universal-Updater wiki for more information. They follow the same structure, inside a block named "scripts". This is a common template, regex is supported at several points, search the repo for examples. Scripts are even able to ask the user questions and react accordingly, however this should be avoided if possible as the entire queue will pause until the question is answered.

	"scripts": {
		"myapp.cia": [
			{
				"type": "downloadRelease",
				"repo": "yourname/myproject",
				"file": "myapp.zip",
				"output": "/myapp.zip"
			},
			{
				"type": "extractFile",
				"file": "/myapp.zip",
				"input": "myapp.cia",
				"output": "/myapp.cia"
			},
			{
				"type": "installCia",
				"file": "/myapp.cia"
			},
			{
				"type": "deleteFile",
				"file": "/myapp.cia"
			},
			{
				"type": "deleteFile",
				"file": "/myapp.zip"
			}
		]
	}