I’m trying to publish a block. My sample is just a block that runs Postgres11. No matter how I twiddle the settings of the Fleet, or the balena.yml, it always shows up as a Fleet, not a Block. It’s up there right now as Postgres11-block, you can get to the github repo from there. Tell me what I’m doing wrong.
While poking around in the source for the other blocks, I noticed that several of them have sw.application type in their balena.yml. I’m stumped.
Hello, you can create a block in your balenaCloud dashboard - look for “blocks” in the menu bar on the left side, and then click the “create block” button. Once you’ve created your block, you can go into the “Settings” menu and enter a “Repository URL” and have it appear on balenaHub by setting “Block visibility” to “on.”
Okay, thanks. Whats the deal with the type field in the balena.yml. Seems to have no effect?
All set.
Hello,
Thanks for publishing a new block. Can you send us the links to blocks that you found to be having the sw.application? BalenaHub is under constant development as we attempt to build the best experience for folks to share their fleets, blocks, and projects. We recently released documentation on how you can use blocks to develop with here: Develop with blocks - Balena Documentation
The best practice is to indeed have type: sw.block when you are creating a block. The blocks you found might be based on old implementations from the time when we didn’t have the functionality to self-serve blocks rather they were being published manually. Rest assured, as time goes on we intend to make the platform more frictionless and stable for everyone to publish, create and share. Thanks for the feedback, and do let us know how else we can improve the experience for you on balenaHub.
I checked the projects listed below and they all had sw.application. Every single balenablocks block, both builder555 blocks I looked at … I found one user-generated block that had sw.block set.
balenaBlocks
audio-aarch64
audio-amd64
audio-arvv7hf
audio-rpi
balena-node-red
bluetooth-aarch64
builder555/balena-basic-motor
builder555/balena-basic-sensor
Would be nice to get a warning if you try to publish a block that has sw.application set or vice-versa.
And while I have someones attention - the blocks UI is already pretty clunky even with so few blocks. Might make sense to create a category for blocks like mine that are just wrappers around third-party services (activemq, postgres …).
Thanks @rodley for sharing your feedback! i will communicate with the team. I’m sure in the next iterations of the balenaHub there will be categories, but at the moment they are still not here. Let me tell this feature request as well to the balenaHub team 
Looking forward to see your blocks and projects at balenaHub.