An app package is essentially a zip archive containing your app’s code and associated assets. App packages must always have a manifest.json to provide meta information about the app itself, and includes the app's version, title, entrypoint(s), settings, etc. A minimal app package might look something like this:

In a minimal app package, we have a manifest.json file describing the app, and an HTML file acting as the entrypoint. This describes a very simple app for presenting an HTML file without any external scripts or assets.

Generally our apps need to do a bit more than display a basic HTML file, and we recommend the use of Vite, React, Typescript and our React UI components as bundled with our app template.

When building an app from our template, we include several tools and configurations to help you start writing your app straight away. Here's the structure of a typical app project:

Notice that we still have a manifest and entrypoint, but we've included the Vite project, Deskpro Apps SDK and dependencies ready for you to start building out features. Our SDK includes a UI toolkit, as well as tools that allow you to communicate with third party APIs and Deskpro itself.

When building an app from our Vite project template, using pnpm build, you'll produce an app package that looks like this:

A summary of the app package contents is as follows:

• manifest.json - file containing meta information about your app (required)

• index.html - your app's entrypoint, you generally might only have one of these and it's pointed to by your manifest (required)

• README.md - some information about how to use your app. This will be presented in the admin section of Deskpro when installing the app (optional)

• icon.svg - your app's icon, must be an SVG (optional)

• /assets - a directory containg your app's assets; JS, fonts, images, etc.

Note that it's important to place the manifest.json, icon.svg and README.md files in the root of your app package so that Deskpro can find them.