Custom App Stores

Companion Hub can load apps from more than one catalog. Alongside the default community store, you can add your own — a private repository of internal apps, a fork you’re testing against, or a curated store from another community.

How it works

An app store is a Git repository containing an apps/ directory, one folder per app. When you add a store, Hub clones that repository into <ROOT_FOLDER_HOST>/repos/ and merges its apps into the App Store view.

Because stores are ordinary Git repositories, a private store needs nothing more than a repository your Hub can clone.

Use cases

• Internal apps — run software for your organisation that shouldn’t be published publicly
• Testing before submission — install from your own fork and verify a clean install before submitting to the community store
• Curated catalogs — track a store maintained by a community you trust

Adding a store

You give Hub two things: a name and a repository URL. Hub derives a slug from the name, clones the repository, and the store’s apps appear in the App Store tagged by origin.

A few rules worth knowing up front:

• Names must be unique, and so must URLs — adding the same repository twice is rejected
• Some names are reserved — you can’t create a store whose slug collides with a built-in one such as ci-marketplace
• If the clone fails, the store isn’t created; check that the URL is reachable from the Hub machine

Apps are identified by store and app ID, so two stores can each ship an app called nextcloud without conflicting.

Removing a store

Removing a store deletes its cloned repository and its entries disappear from the App Store. Apps you already installed from it keep running — they’re ordinary Docker Compose projects at that point — but they will no longer receive updates from the catalog.