Packaging

The contents of your application needs to be packaged into an .appx archive for distribution. Later these .appx packages can be put into an .appxbundle that can contain multiple variants of an application (e.g. multiple app packages for different architectures).

The saker.windows package supports both of the above packaging steps. It uses the makeappx.exe tool under the hood.

App package

App packages are single archives that contains the application and its resources, targeted at a single device architecture. They can be created using the saker.appx.package() build task. It takes the previously prepared contents of your app.

$prepared = saker.appx.prepare(### ... ###)
saker.appx.package($prepared)

The created .appx archive will be put in the build directory.

App bundle

An app bundle is a type of package that can contain multiple app packages, each of which is built to support a specific device architecture. It usually has the .appxbundle extension and can be created using the saker.appx.bundle() task. It takes the embedded applications as input mapped to their archive paths:

$pkg_x86 = saker.appx.package(### ... ###)
$pkg_x64 = saker.appx.package(### ... ###)
$pkg_ARM = saker.appx.package(### ... ###)
saker.appx.bundle({
	$pkg_x86[Path]: "MyApp_x86.appx",
	$pkg_x64[Path]: "MyApp_x64.appx",
	$pkg_ARM[Path]: "MyApp_ARM.appx"
})

The above creates an .appxbundle that contains the app for each architecture. The values for the mappings specify the path a given application will have in the archive. You can also specify the empty path to have it take the name of the input file:

saker.appx.bundle({
	$pkg_x86[Path]: "",
	$pkg_x64[Path]: "",
	$pkg_ARM[Path]: ""
})

You generally only need to set the archive paths in (rare) cases when conflicts occurr.

The created .appxbundle will be put in the build directory.

Note: If you're creating the packages for distribution, make sure to sign the .appx before putting them in the .appxbundle.