app-bundle-framework

(WIP) Distro-agnostic, easy, portable Linux App Bundles

Goals

The goal is to make universal (distro-agnostic) Linux app deployment as easy as:

$ makeapp binary-name

App Bundles include all necessary binaries & shared libraries to run. Running them ought to be as simple as:

$ runapp program.app

This is still a work-in-progress, and is not fully production-ready yet. Currently, this is perfectly usable for basic command-line apps (see 'helloworld-example' and 'arguments-example')

--

Try making an App Bundle of a program on your computer! For example:

$ makeapp /usr/bin/htop

Will (if you have 'htop' installed) make a bundle in the current working directory called htop.app. This App Bundle can then be shipped to any other Linux system, on its own, and run with:

$ runapp /location/of/htop.app

Structure

The App Bundle structure is as follows:

• Root directory (some-program.app)
  • bin/: subdirectory containing binaries
  • libs/: subdirectory containing shared libraries
  • resources/: subdirectory containing icons etc
  • appinfo: XML manifest containing the information needed to run the app (App name, main binary, icon, etc)

See 'bundle-structure-example.app' for an example App Bundle (or run $ make app on one of the other examples to see what is created)

Requirements

'makeapp' requires patchelf in order to ship your App Bundle with libc (or other interpreter) in the libs/ subdirectory. By doing this, we can ensure that App Bundles will run on systems with other versions of libc etc.

On Debian-based systems, patchelf can be installed with:

# apt install patchelf