application bundle creator

abcreate is a CLI tool to create a macOS application bundle from executables, libraries and resource files in a given installation prefix directory. It takes its instructions from an XML based configuration file (see the examples).

This tool was built to replace GTK Mac Bundler in my projects. It is specifically targeted towards GTK based applications and not a general-purpose packaging tool at this point.
Features and fixes will be developed as I go and to the extent as required for my projects.

💁 This is to be considered "beta" software. While I already use it in production, I haven't settled on the final direction.

Features

• Require as little configuration as possible in a simple XML file that's easy to understand.
• Automatically pull in linked libraries.
• Automatically adjust library link paths in executables and libraries with relocatability in mind.
• Targeted exclusively towards GTK based apps (GTK versions 3 and 4), e.g. take care of pixbuf loaders, compile typelib files etc.

Installation

abcreate is on PyPi, you can simply run:

pip install abcreate

Usage

Let's look at an example:

abcreate create bundle.xml -i $HOME/install_prefix -o $HOME/output_dir

• The first argument is a command. At the moment, there is only one command available, which is create.
• The create command expects
  • the name of a XML configuration file, e.g. bundle.xml
  • the install prefix directory (-i) containing bin, lib, share etc. directories of the applicatin you want to package
  • the output directory (-o) where the application bundle will be created in

License

GPL-2.0-or-later