Hangar catalog

The default hangar catalog, catalog.xml, is used by the FlightGear built-in launcher to list all aircraft of the official FGAddon FlightGear hangar. 3rd party hangars can also provide a catalog URL via their own catalog.xml file.

Catalog generation

The catalog.xml file can be generated using fg-build-catalog from the flightgear Python package built from fgmeta-python (the script was previously called update-catalog.py and was located in FGMeta). Configuration files and templates for fg-build-catalog that are used to generate the catalog for the FGAddon official hangar are contained in the catalog directory. To generate the FGAddon catalog, as an example, you need to install the flightgear Python package according to the instructions in fgmeta-python's README.md file, then run a command like:

fg-build-catalog --no-update fgaddon-trunk-catalog

You'll likely want to run this from a directory where you've copied and adjusted the configuration files. Output files will be written to the current directory by default, in particular to the output subdirectory. See catalog/README.md for more detailed instructions.

The idea is to create a subdirectory tree for each catalog (fgaddon-trunk-catalog in the above example). This subdirectory can have any name; it contains the configuration and administrative files for maintaining the catalog. The catalog.config.xml config file inside the catalog directory will need to be adjusted for each new hangar. The script builds the contents locally which then needs to be uploaded to an appropriate place on a server (fg-build-catalog can perform the upload itself: see the FGAddon trunk catalog configuration for instance).

See also

Wiki articles

• Aircraft Center
• Catalog metadata
• FlightGear hangars#Third party sites - List of third-party hangars, of which some have a catalog.xml file.

Mailing list threads

• [Flightgear-devel] Testing changes to update_catalog.py (November 2016)

Source code

• Main source file for fg-build-catalog
• Official catalog configuration and templates

Default catalog

• Default location of the FGAddon trunk catalog.xml file
• Default location of the FGAddon 2024.1.* catalog.xml file