export import-able list of installed flatpaks

export_installed_flatpaks.md

I was switching to a new computer today and wanted to install all the flatpaks on my old one, without having to do anything manually of course

It turned out to be pretty easy, but I didn't find any obvious guide on the internet, so I figured I would document my solution

At first I tried the command: flatpak list --app --columns=application > installed_flatpaks.txt This will give you a list of only the application ID's, but each will be on a newline

The issue is that each ID is on its own line. To fix this, I added a second part to the command: flatpak list --app --columns=application | xargs echo -n > installed_flatpaks.txt

The last step if you want to turn this into a script is to edit the file and add "flatpak install" in front of all the package names. You can then rename it e.g. "install_flatpaks.sh" and then run it on the new system with sh install_flatpaks.sh

I used a text editor to prepend this, but alternatively, there might be a way to prepend "flatpak install" using the CLI, but I'm not aware of any that's less complicated than just using a text editor.

tmp=$(flatpak list --app --columns=application | xargs echo -n) && echo -e '#!/bin/bash'"\nflatpak install "$tmp > install_flatpaks.sh && sudo chmod +x install_flatpaks.sh
Thanks for the command. I tried to "improve it" so that it automatically creates the shell script. This is my second time scripting so please don't sue me for ugly code.

You can also do this:
flatpak list --app --columns=origin --columns=application | awk '{print "flatpak install " $1,$2 " -y"}' > ~/flatpaks.sh

thanks, that looks much cleaner lol