Expose directories

Use this guide if you need to reach other directories in the Flatpak.

The Bottles Flatpak is sandboxed and confined in its directories. It makes use of portals to let you open and save files in other directories.

Despite this, there are some cases where you may want to explicitly expose directories to the Flatpak, e.g.:

• let the Importer find windows prefixes from other managers directories;

• use the file chooser provided by the runner to open/save files in your system, outside the sandbox.

To achieve this, we can run the command

flatpak override --user --filesystem="path" com.usebottles.bottles

or to manage more complex cases through a GUI we can use an external program named Flatseal, it can be easily installed from Flathub using a compatible store like GNOME Software, elementary Appcenter or Discover. It is also possible to install through the command line:

flatpak install flathub com.github.tchx84.Flatseal

At the first launch of Flatseal you need to select Bottles from the left menu, then scroll to the Filesystem section and make your choices.

Flatseal > Bottles

We suggest to not expose all your system or home but manually add each directory in Other files. In the following example we are exposing the ~/Games folder from our home (the default location for Lutris windows prefixes).

Exposing the ~/Games directory

Then the Bottles Importer will see the new directory.