abcreate 0.5

application bundle creator

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 inspired by and built to replace GTK Mac Bundler in my projects. Features and fixes will be developed as I go and to the extent as required for said projects. There are no plans to turn this into a general-purpose "swiss army knife" of packaging tools.

💁 For the time being, this is to be considered "alpha" software. It works for the cases I need it to work.

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 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, simply run:

pip install abcreate

Usage

Let's look at an example:

abcreate create bundle.xml -s $HOME/install_prefix -t $HOME

• 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
  • a source directory (-s) containing bin, lib, share etc. directories, i.e. the install prefix of the software you want to package
  • a target directory (-t) where the application bundle will be created in

License

GPL-2.0-or-later