Possible to view contents of appimages?

[Imagus]

I am learning to make appimages (haven't got much success yet) and was wondering if it was possible to open some appimages that I downloaded to see what's inside and "how they did it". For me that would be a great way to learn and help me understand what I may be doing wrong in my own attempts at making an appimage.

Is there a program that will allow me to open appimages? I tried archive manager, but that doesn't recogize the appimage format. Also haven't had much luck finding something online.

Thanks for any help.

[Larry78723]

Here's a YouTube on building AppImages: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wy63jwj ... DistroTube

[BenTrabetere]

You can extract the contents of am AppImage from the command line using the --appimage-extract switch. I suggest creating an empty directory and copying the AppImage to it, that way the extracted directory structure is in its own directory. But that is not required.

Open a terminal, navigate to the location of the AppImage, and (if the name of the AppImage is your.AppImage) for enter. The ./ is important.

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./your.AppImage --appimage-extract

The --appimage-extract switch is a handy way to retrieve icon that is embedded in the AppImage.

[Imagus]

Here's a YouTube on building AppImages: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wy63jwj ... DistroTube

I have watched that video a few times, but he only makes an appimage from a single binary, not one with dependencies. Still it's a good video to start.

[Imagus]

You can extract the contents of am AppImage from the command line using the --appimage-extract switch. I suggest creating an empty directory and copying the AppImage to it, that way the extracted directory structure is in its own directory. But that is not required.

Open a terminal, navigate to the location of the AppImage, and (if the name of the AppImage is your.AppImage) for enter. The ./ is important.

Code: Select all

./your.AppImage --appimage-extract

The --appimage-extract switch is a handy way to retrieve icon that is embedded in the AppImage.

Thank you, this is helpful. I have tried it on a few appimages and noticed that it works in different ways. The appimage of LibreOffice bluntly tells me "Permission denied", another appimage extracted everything in a folder squashfs-root and placed it in the current folder, and another one extracted itself in /tmp and disappeared as soon as I closed the program.

[BenTrabetere]

The appimage of LibreOffice bluntly tells me "Permission denied"

Most of the time when you get this error it is because the AppImage is not executable. I was able to extract the LO AppImage - make it executable and try again. Which one extracted to /tmp ... and was it integrated to the desktop?

[Imagus]

Most of the time when you get this error it is because the AppImage is not executable. I was able to extract the LO AppImage - make it executable and try again. Which one extracted to /tmp ... and was it integrated to the desktop?

Ok, my bad... LibreOffice did indeed extract fine after making it executable. The one that extracts to tmp is Avidemux. When I entered

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./avidemux_2.7.4.appImage --appimage-extract

in the terminal, it extracted to /tmp/.mount_5B7SU9 (random string) and then it launched the program. When I closed the program the directory was deleted immediately.

I'm sure I'll learn a lot by going through the extracted appimages; it is still not clear how I can tell which dependencies a program needs and where to put them in the image.

[Hoser Rob]

This isn't somethuing I've done but it seems to me a good place to start would be to take a program on your system you want to use for this and enter "apt-cache show <app name>".

Among other things you' should see a list of dependencies for that r, with specified ranges of versions for those dependencies. Sometimes it specifies just one version release though I wouldn't think that was a good sign. This is all done by the program dev(s)/package maintainers.

At least it should give you some idea of why many .deb files and ppa sources fail to install for your Mint release.