Get appimage-builder

AppImage

appimage-builder is available as ready to use AppImage for amd64 systems. Just download it from the releases and make it executable. In case you want it to be available in your cli as a command you can move it to /usr/local/bin or other location in your PATH.

wget -O appimage-builder-x86_64.AppImage https://github.com/AppImageCrafters/appimage-builder/releases/download/v1.1.0/appimage-builder-1.1.0-x86_64.AppImage
chmod +x appimage-builder-x86_64.AppImage

# install (optional)
sudo mv appimage-builder-x86_64.AppImage /usr/local/bin/appimage-builder

Docker Image

There is a docker image with appimage-builder ready to be used at hub.docker.com.

docker pull appimagecrafters/appimage-builder:latest

Note

Testing AppImages is not supported on this format. Always use –skip-test.

Manual Installation

The project is built using Python 3 and uses various command-line applications to fulfill its goal. Depending on the host system and the recipe the packages providing such applications may vary.

Installing dependencies

Debian/Ubuntu

sudo apt install -y binutils coreutils desktop-file-utils fakeroot fuse libgdk-pixbuf2.0-dev patchelf python3-pip python3-setuptools squashfs-tools strace util-linux zsync

# Install appimagetool AppImage (only for appimage-buidler < v1.0.3)
sudo wget https://github.com/AppImage/AppImageKit/releases/download/continuous/appimagetool-x86_64.AppImage -O /usr/local/bin/appimagetool
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/appimagetool

Archlinux

sudo pacman -Sy binutils desktop-file-utils fakeroot gdk-pixbuf2 patchelf python-pip python-setuptools squashfs-tools strace wget zsync

# Install appimagetool AppImage (only for appimage-buidler < v1.0.3)
sudo wget https://github.com/AppImage/AppImageKit/releases/download/continuous/appimagetool-x86_64.AppImage -O /usr/local/bin/appimagetool
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/appimagetool

Installing appimage-builder

Installing latest tagged release:

sudo pip3 install appimage-builder

Installing development version:

sudo pip3 install git+https://github.com/AppImageCrafters/appimage-builder.git

Install appimagetool

Note

Only for appimage-buidler < v1.0.3

There is an issue in the AppImage runtime format that prevents it proper execution inside docker containers. Therefore we must use the following workaround to make appimagetool work properly.

# Install appimagetool AppImage
sudo wget https://github.com/AppImage/AppImageKit/releases/download/continuous/appimagetool-x86_64.AppImage -O /opt/appimagetool

# workaround AppImage issues with Docker
cd /opt/; sudo chmod +x appimagetool; sed -i 's|AI\x02|\x00\x00\x00|' appimagetool; sudo ./appimagetool --appimage-extract
sudo mv /opt/squashfs-root /opt/appimagetool.AppDir
sudo ln -s /opt/appimagetool.AppDir/AppRun /usr/local/bin/appimagetool