nico579-commons

Shared building blocks for four small open-source apps: blink2video, lidar2map, watch2notif and gpxsolar.

Each of them grew its own copy of the same pieces: the system tray icon, the local web server, atomic file writes, the update check. Every fix had to be carried by hand into the other copies, and some were forgotten. This package gathers those pieces in one place, one module each, so that the four apps behave the same and a fix lands everywhere at once.

Modules

• nico579_commons.tray: the tray icon, with the very same menu in all four apps: Open, "Update to x.y" only when a newer version is known, Restart, Stop, and "Create a Desktop shortcut". There is no room for app-specific entries on purpose: everything else lives in the page that Open brings up. The menu is rebuilt every five seconds, on the main thread under macOS; Restart, Stop and Update run off the icon's message loop, and the icon waits for them before returning.
• nico579_commons.raccourci: a desktop shortcut in one call, as a .lnk on Windows, a small .app on macOS and a trusted .desktop file on Linux.
• nico579_commons.maj: a light check for a newer GitHub release, asked at most once an hour by a background thread, so the tray menu and the page read the answer without waiting for the network.
• nico579_commons.relance: what "Restart" needs. Under the app's own systemd user service, systemd itself restarts it, since a process spawned from inside the service would be killed along with it; elsewhere, a new detached process, in its own session so that launchd leaves it alone. hors_du_service() does the same for a second process that must outlive the app, such as lidar2map's "New instance": under the service, it starts in a scope of its own (systemd-run --user --scope).
• nico579_commons.environnement: gives system programs (systemctl, xdg-open, the browser) the LD_LIBRARY_PATH they had before the PyInstaller bootloader prefixed it with the app's own libraries.
• nico579_commons.atomique: atomic JSON writes, tolerant JSON reads (BOM, transient Windows refusals) and an inter-process file lock.
• nico579_commons.dossiers: where an app keeps its state (the OS data folder) and its outputs (Documents), an <APP>_HOME override, and the one-time carry-over of the state an older version kept in its working folder. An app is a Dossiers("name", ...) with its own file names.
• nico579_commons.serveweb: the local web server behind each app's page: static files, /api/* routes in JSON, and the checks on where a request comes from (Host, client address, Origin, Sec-Fetch-Site). An app subclasses Handler for its own variable and routes with query parameters. Also finds a free port and tells whether an instance of the app already answers.

The inventory of what is shared, and where the work stands, lives in INVENTAIRE.md (in French). python outils/inventaire_communs.py re-measures what is still duplicated across the four repositories (read-only); ANALYSE-MUTUALISATION-2026-09-29.md is the analysis it produced.

Install

pip install nico579-commons          # relance, raccourci, maj, environnement
pip install "nico579-commons[tray]"  # plus pystray and Pillow, for the icon

The package on its own requires nothing: only tray needs pystray and Pillow (the tray extra, plus jeepney on Linux), and tray.disponible() says whether they, and a notification area, are there. An app that lists them itself does not need the extra.

On Linux, when the desktop offers a StatusNotifierItem host (GNOME with the AppIndicator extension, as on Ubuntu; KDE Plasma), the icon talks that protocol directly over D-Bus (nico579_commons.tray_sni, pure Python with jeepney, no GTK or PyGObject), because pystray's X11 fallback shows the icon under Wayland but opens no menu. Elsewhere pystray is used as before.

Use

from nico579_commons import tray

actions = tray.Actions(ouvrir=open_page, redemarrer=restart, arreter=stop,
                       version_disponible=cached_newer_version,
                       mettre_a_jour=start_update,
                       creer_raccourci=create_desktop_shortcut,
                       langue=current_language)
tray.Tray("myapp", Path("assets/myapp.ico"), actions).executer()

Python 3.8 or later: blink2video still ships a Windows 7 build on 3.8.

License

GPL-3.0-or-later, like the four apps.