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appimagetool

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appimagetool

This is an experimental implementation of the AppImage command line tool, appimagetool, in Go, mainly to see what is possible. It can also do, using the deploy verb, what linuxdeployqt does.

Installation and usage

Assuming you are using a 64-bit Intel machine (amd64, also known as x86_64), you can use our pre-compiled binaries. To try it out:

wget -c https://github.com/$(wget -q https://github.com/probonopd/go-appimage/releases/expanded_assets/continuous -O - | grep "appimagetool-.*-x86_64.AppImage" | head -n 1 | cut -d '"' -f 2)
chmod +x appimagetool-*.AppImage
./appimagetool-*.AppImage -s deploy ./AppDir/usr/share/applications/*.desktop # Bundle EVERYTHING
# or 
./appimagetool-*.AppImage deploy ./AppDir/usr/share/applications/*.desktop # Bundle everything expect what comes with the base system
# and
VERSION=1.0 ./appimagetool-*.AppImage ./AppDir # turn AppDir into AppImage

https://github.com/probonopd/go-appimage/releases/tag/continuous has builds for 32-bit Intel, 32-bit ARM (e.g., Raspberry Pi), and 64-bit ARM.

Recognized env vars

  • QTDIR: root directory for the Qt installation to copy shared libraries from, e.g. /usr/lib/qt6/

Update Information (for CI/CD)

When appimagetool runs on GitHub Actions, it automatically:

  1. Embeds UpdateInformation into the AppImage
  2. Generates a .zsync file alongside the AppImage for efficient delta updates
  3. Uploads both files to the GitHub Release

The UpdateInformation format is:

gh-releases-zsync|<owner>|<repo>|<release>|<AppName>-*-<arch>.AppImage.zsync

This is detected automatically using GITHUB_REPOSITORY and GITHUB_REF environment variables.

The release channel is determined as:

  • continuous - for builds from the master branch
  • latest - for tagged releases (non-continuous)

Features

Implemented

  • Creates AppImage
  • If running on GitHub Actions, determines updateinformation, embeds updateinformation, signs, and writes zsync file
  • Simplified signing
  • Automatic upload to GitHub Releases
  • Prepare self-contained AppDirs using the deploy verb
  • Bundle GStreamer
  • Bundle Qt
  • Bundle Qml
  • Obey excludelist (unless invoked in self-contained a.k.a. "bundle everything" mode)

Envisioned

  • Bundle QtWebEngine (untested)
  • Bundle Python
  • GitLab support
  • OBS support
  • ...

Building

If for whatever reason you would like to build from source:

scripts/build.sh appimagetool