Display various information about the installed metadata and the metadata cache.

Get a component by it's identifier.

Search the AppStream component database for a given search term.

Return components which provide a given item. An item type can be specified using the TYPE parameter, a value to search for has to be supplied using the TERM parameter.

Examples:

Get components which handle the "text/xml" mimetype.

appstreamcli what-provides mimetype "text/xml"

Get component which provides the "libfoo.so.2" library.

appstreamcli what-provides lib libfoo.so.2

Trigger a database refresh, if necessary. In case you want to force the database to be rebuilt, supply the --force flag.

This command must be executed with root permission.

Dump the XML description of a component with the given ID.

Validate AppStream XML metadata for compliance with the specification.

Both XML metadata types, upstream and distro XML, are handled. The filetype which should be validated is determined automatically.

The --pedantic flag triggers a more pedantic validation of the file, including minor and style issues in the report.

Validate AppStream XML metadata found in a file-tree.

This performs a standard validation of all found metadata, but also checks for additional errors, like the presence of .desktop files and validity of other additional metadata.

Install a software component by its ID.

This resolves the AppStream component ID to the package name which provides it and then calls the distribution's package manager to install the software.

This feature is experimental.

Install a metadata file into the right directory on the current machine.

Compare two version numbers. If two version numbers are given as parameters, the versions will be compared and the comparison result will be printed to stdout.

If a version number, a comparison operator and another version number are passed in as parameter, the result of the comparison operation will be printed to stdout, and appstreamcli will exit with a non-zero exit status in case the comparison failed. The comparison operator can be one of the following:

Create a metainfo file template to be used by software projects. The --from-desktop option can be used to use a .desktop file as template for generating the example file.

The generated files contain example entries which need to be filed in with the actual desired values by the project author.

The first TYPE parameter is the name of an AppStream component type. For a complete list check out the documentation[2] or the help output of appstreamcli for this subcommand.

Print out more information about a found component.

Don't print colored output.

Do not access the network when validating metadata.

The same effect can be achieved by setting the AS_VALIDATE_NONET environment variable before running appstreamcli.

Display the version number of appstreamcli