Homebrew App Store

A Chesto-based graphical frontend to the get package manager for downloading and managing homebrew on video game consoles, such as the Nintendo Switch and Wii U. This is a replacement to the older Wii U Homebrew App Store.

Supported Platforms

Nintendo Switch

To run this program, a Nintendo Switch with access to the Homebrew Menu is required. This can be done on most Switches manufactured before July 2018, for compatibility check your serial number at ismyswitchpatched.com. To run hbmenu, see the tutorial here.

Download and extract the latest hb-appstore to sd:/switch/appstore/, and run "HB App Store" from within hbmenu. When you're done, you can press the Home or Minus buttons to exit.

Nintendo Wii U

To run this program, a modded Wii U is required. This can be done on any console or firmware, but for a compatibility check anyway, see ismywiiupatched.com. To run the Homebrew Launcher, see the tutorial here.

Download and extract the latest hb-appstore to sd:/wiiu/apps/appstore/, and run "HB App Store" from within Homebrew Launcher. When you're done, you can press the Home or Minus buttons to exit.

If you're using the Aroma beta, you can use the .wuhb file instead of the .rpx to launch the app directly from the Wii U home menu instead of HBL.

Custom Music

Place a mp3 file named background.mp3 in one of the following two locations:

• Wii U: sd:/wiiu/apps/appstore/background.mp3
• Switch: sd:/switch/appstore/background.mp3

Web and Desktop

Web browsers can download files from the Homebrew App Store at apps.fortheusers.org. Source code: hbas-frontend.

Desktop platforms (Windows, MacOS, and Linux), can use @LyfeOnEdge's unofficial-appstore, or their alternative program: HBUpdater.

There is a PC port of the same client source code for Linux, Mac, and Windows that can be downloaded from the nightlies. This will download files to an sdroot folder where the app is ran.

3DS and Wii

There are work-in-progress ports to 3DS and Wii, with varying degrees of feature support. These can be compiled using the instructions below, but aren't yet ready to be used by most users.

These clients are being developed with the intent to hook up to other existing non-libget repos (such as Wii/OSC and 3ds/universal-db) in the future. libget has *Repo.cpp implementations that would be extended to add this support.

Maintaining a repo

See get's instructions for setting up a repository. Everything is designed to be statically hosted. If there's no repo provided in the repos.json config file, then it will generate a default one pointing to wiiu.cdn.fortheusers.com or switch.cdn.fortheusers.com.

If you run into any issues and need help maintaining or setting up a libget repo, feel free to get in touch with vgmoose at me@vgmoose.com or on Discord.

Compilation instructions

This program is written using chesto and has dependencies on libcurl, libget, and zlib. The chesto and libget libraries are included in this repo as submodules. SDL2 or SDL1 is also required depending on the target platform.

You can get pre-compiled binaries for each platform under GH Actions for a given commit. Click here to download the latest nightly builds without signing in.

Building with Docker

The easiest way to build is using the Sealeo docker container. It uses this dependency helper script to be able to build for all supported platforms. This is how the pre-compiled binaries are built.

1. Install Docker
2. Run the following, replacing switch with the target platform (one of switch, wiiu, or pc):

git clone --recursive https://github.com/fortheusers/hb-appstore.git
cd hb-appstore
export PLATFORM=switch    # or wiiu, 3ds, wii, pc, pc-sdl1
docker run -v $(pwd):/code -it ghcr.io/fortheusers/sealeo /bin/bash -c "cd /code && make $PLATFORM"

Depending on which platform you chose, appstore.nro or appstore.rpx should now be sitting in the cloned directory. When building for Wii U, an appstore.wuhb file will also be present.

Building for Specific Platforms

Compilation instructions for specific supported platforms (Switch, Wii U, 3DS, Wii) can be found in Compiling.md

License

This software is licensed under the GPLv3.

Free software is software that gives you the user the freedom to share, study and modify it. We call this free software because the user is free. - Free Software Foundation

Maintainers

• vgmoose
• pwsincd
• Nightkingale
• rw-r-r_0644
• crc32
• Compucat

Contributing

If you have some functionality that you'd like to see feel free to discuss it on an issues page, or if you already have an implementation or desire that you'd like to see, feel free to fork and make a pull request!

For code contributions, it's not required, but running a clang-format before making a PR helps to clean up styling issues:

find . \( -name "*.cpp" -or -name "*.hpp" \) -not -path "./libs/*" -exec clang-format -i {} \;

Contributors

Code Contributors

This project exists thanks to all the people who contribute!

Financial Contributions

Special thanks to dojafoja for donating to the project in the past! The funds went directly torwards repository hosting and maintenance. (Archived OpenCollective link)

If you would like to monetarily support this project, we ask that you instead make a donation towards some other cause instead. Here are a few notable ones:

• Wikipedia / Wikimedia
• Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Save the Children
• Partners in Health
• Good Food Institute
• Mercy for Animals
• Fandom Forward
• NaNoWriMo

Thank you!