AppStream

Machine-readable software metadata for desktop environments

AppStream is a collaborative effort for making machine-readable software metadata easily available to programs that need it. It is part of the Freedesktop ecosystem and provides a convenient way to retrieve information about available software. AppStream consists of a specification to describe individual software component metadata in XML (so-called MetaInfo files), as well as a derived specification for a metadata-collection format to provide a list of these metadata entries in XML or YAML for easy consumption by software centers and other tools which need to know about available software in a repository.