this is for anyone controlling a webhost that wants to offer a handful of apks to a optionally closed group of F-Droid clients. The alternative title is “host Playstore apks in F-Droid”. How you’d fetch them is out of scope, but there’s a few utils kicking around on github.
It’s less than a dozen commands overall to setup the repo, depending on what you already have. Here’s a youtube video that walks you trough the official fdroidserver setup docs. All the fdroid commands can be ran host-side - no need to set things up on the remote, just rsync the repo/ folder.
example
fdroid init
cp app.apk repo/
# minimally, edit repo_url, insert basic auth into url
# `https://user:secret@example.com/fdroid/repo`
vi config.yml
fdroid update --create-metadata
# assumes that webroot is already setup
rsync -avz repo/ example.com:/var/www/html/fdroid/repo/
# open the url in the bowser, scan the qrcode with the device
# or share the url per messenger - both include the user:secret
Sensible to do: verify the very first apk (per appid) signature host-side and compare to any subsequent apk. After the first apk is installed on the Smartphone, the usual Android apk security model takes care to do this device side. Edit the metadata/xyz.yml for nicer App descriptions.
There’s also the GUI package repomaker that wraps some of fdroidserver, but its ongoing renovation (django 2 → 4) has stalled. Still worth to look into for beginners as it ships in a flatpak.