HowTo? - Create a GitHub Kodi Repository

Details: Written by: Mike Borsch; Category: HowTo?; Published: 18 October 2023; Hits: 106

This article describes how to create a Github Kodi Repository with an Addon.

Issue

When I was using an Addon for Kodi called "Order Favourites", I noticed that it did not work for the Confluence skin and the owner had no intentions to improve on the Addon and did not host the addon in a repository. I decided that I wanted to create an Addon and a Repository in GitHub to serve up a fixed/improved version of the Addon.

Steps

Create an identity on GitHub. I created "M-Borsch" on GitHub: M-Borsch (Mike Borsch) (github.com)
Create your Addon. In my case I created a Program Addon "Insert/Swap Kodi Favourites": https://github.com/M-Borsch/Insert-Swap-Kodi-Favourites
Create a Repository and add your Addon into the Repository.
Edit the index.html page in the root of the Repository to deliver your repo.
Create a web presence to host your Repository
1. To do this you need to use the "Settings - Pages" area and deploy from your default branch. This will use your index.html to create a default landing page that can serve up your releases of your repo.

Tips / Tricks

These are some of the challenges that I discovered during the development of the Repository and Addon.

Be careful developing on Kodi in Windows (appears to have caching challenges)
- I noted that when you attempt to load an Addon or Repository you may get a "Failed to load...."
  - This happens when you delete a previous version of a repo or addon and immediatey attempt to load a new one
  - This "Failed to load...." error does not necessarily mean that there is something / anything wrong with your package (zip). Simply exit Kodi - re-launch and try your load your addon or repo again.
- At one point, I was unable to re-load my Repository at all?? It would load successfully but would erve up a "cached" or "previous" version of the associated Addon / Repo was being delivered.
  - I attempted to clear the cache in Kodi but was not successful in getting the new addon to be delivered from the revised Repository. I loaded the repo on another Unix based box running CoreElec and it worked fine. I eventually ended up having to completely un-install Kodi (including deleting the user profile) on the Windows machine and started over from scratch to get it to load correctly. Very frustrating.
- You will need to create an md5 file for your "addons" file.
  - I used powershell and "get-filehash" on Windows to create my SHA256 code for your addons.xml.md5 file