appimage-builder 0.1.1

Recipe based AppImage creation meta-tool

AppImageBuilder

A recipe based AppImage creation meta-tool featuring:

Done:

• Structured recipes
• AppImage creation in modern system (backward compatibility is keep)
• all-in bundles (no external dependencies but Linux Kernel and libfuse)
• distributions compatibility testing
• Assisted licensing compliance

Todo:

• Embed software tracking
• AppDir structure validation
• Reproducible builds*
• continuous integration ready

Limitations:

• only Debian based systems are supported as build platform. If you think we should support another please let us know.

Features description

Structured recipes

Recipes are wrote using the yaml format resulting in a well structured and human readable recipe were each build step is specified in a different section.

User can check the examples folder for already built recipes.

AppImage creation in modern system

Building an AppImage in a modern system using the traditional methods renders to bundles incompatible with any distribution released before due glib and glibc missing features.

AppImageBuilder fixes this issue by embedding those libraries and the required loader tool making your bundle really self-sufficient.

all-in bundles

All goes into the resulting AppImage file. And by all we also mean libc, glib, libssl and any other library. This may render having outdated bundles a security issue. But bundles can be easily rebuilt by user or developers so it just takes an update.

A draw-back of this feature is that the resulting AppImage have a larger size, yet it's about ~10 mb which is not a big deal in modern times.

distributions compatibility testing

Compatibility tests can be easily setup to run the resulting bundle in different distributions by means of docker. Therefore developers can have a real idea of where they software will be able to run.

Embed software tracking

As the bundle is built using the packages from the host system package manager it's possible to store the exact list of which software was embed and it's version. By retriving this information security tools can detect if there are vulnerabilities reported for such versions and warn the users about it.

AppDir structure validation

To check whether the AppDir is properly formed and there are no missing resources.

Reproducible builds

Recipes can be embed in the resulting bundle so users can recreate the package without major efforts and compare the results.

Assisted licensing compliance

The host system package manager already include the licenses of every software piece therefore this information is also passed into the resulting bundle.

continuous integration ready

Provide hooks to publish the resulting bundle into the different applications stores or binary hosting services.