appimagelint.md

Tutorial III : Packaging Archivy

Packaging appimagelint

The appimagelint's documentation, tells

appimagelint is a tool to check AppImage files for common issues. appimagelint runs a variety of checks on AppImages and reports the results in human-readable form in the console log.

So to get started

1. This step is optional: create the AppImage on the oldest distro for full compatability. In this tutorial, I am going to use the oldest LTS version of Ubuntu, i.e Ubuntu Xenial aka 16.04

   docker pull ubuntu:16.04
   docker run -it ubuntu:16.04

2. Download pyappimage's appimage for a specific python version. For my test case, I am using python3.8 pyappimage.

   sudo apt update 
   sudo apt install file  # or else appimagetool will fail in future
   sudo apt install wget  # optional : to download pyappimage's appimage
   wget https://github.com/srevinsaju/pyappimage/releases/download/continuous/pyappimage-3.8-x86_64.AppImage
   chmod +x pyappimage*.AppImage

3. Cool. Now download the appimagelint source code.

   git clone https://github.com/TheAssassin/appimagelint
   cd appimagelint

4. Now make a folder called pyappimage

   mkdir pyappimage
   cd pyappimage
   touch pyappimage.json

5. Now edit the pyappimage/pyappimage.json file, to add the following content.

   name: appimagelint
   entrypoint: appimagelint.cli:run
   categories:
     - Utility

if you are curious on where appimagelint.cli:run came from, here, on the setup.py, there is a section called console_scripts, this has something like this

   entry_points={
        "console_scripts": [
            "appimagelint = appimagelint.cli:run",
        ],
    },

So, I took the entrypoint from there.

If you are trying to package your own application, this is how entrypoint works appimagelint.cli:run is translated to from appimagelint.cli import run; run()

6. Add updateinformation to json. Update information is a static link to a file to get zsync or update information i.e, the appimage you are bundling, can be delta updated. For more information on how to write updateinformation, see AppImage Docs updateinformation

   My final json looks like this

   name: appimagelint
   entrypoint: appimagelint.cli:run
   categories:
     - Utility
   updateinformation: gh-releases-zsync|TheAssassin|appimagelint|latest|appimagelint*.AppImage.zsync

7. Bootstrap pyappimage. 🎉 You are ready to build. The command to build Python AppImage is simple; just

   ./pyappimage=*.AppImage build

   In case you are failing with a libfuse error, add the --appimage-extract-and-run option before build And you are done.

8. Test the generated AppImage, The generated appimage, is called appimagelint-x86_64.AppImage Run it by

   ./appimagelint-x86_64.AppImage --help

   But this would fail now. Because of an odd error

   Traceback (most recent call last):
   	File "entrypoint.py", line 12, in <module>
   	File "appimagelint/cli.py", line 91, in run
   		args = parse_args()
   	File "appimagelint/cli.py", line 47, in parse_args
   		action="version", version=get_version(),
   	File "appimagelint/cli.py", line 18, in get_version
   		version = pkg_resources.require("appimagelint")[0].version
   	File "pkg_resources/__init__.py", line 899, in require
   	File "pkg_resources/__init__.py", line 785, in resolve
   pkg_resources.DistributionNotFound: The 'appimagelint' distribution was not found and is required by the application
   [886] Failed to execute script entrypoint

   Looking at the traceback, it looks like on appimagelint/cli.py at line 18, appimagelint is trying to call pkg_resources.require, which calls the pip data to see the version which was installed. But pyappimage does not bundle pip metadata. So we might need to replace that data

   So my patch looks like this:

diff --git a/appimagelint/cli.py b/appimagelint/cli.py
index e734440..5266e53 100644
--- a/appimagelint/cli.py
+++ b/appimagelint/cli.py
@@ -15,7 +15,7 @@ from .checks import IconsCheck, GlibcABICheck, GlibcxxABICheck, DesktopFilesChec
def get_version():
		 try:
				 import pkg_resources
-        version = pkg_resources.require("appimagelint")[0].version
+        version = '0.0.1'
		 except ImportError:
				 version = "unknown"

9. Try the build again to see if it works

    ./pyappimage=*.AppImage build

   In case you are failing with a libfuse error, add the --appimage-extract-and-run option before build And you are done.

10. Attempt to run again. This time it fails with a different error

./appimagelint-x86_64.AppImage --appimage-extract-and-run
Traceback (most recent call last):
	File "PyInstaller/hooks/rthooks/pyi_rth__tkinter.py", line 20, in <module>
FileNotFoundError: Tcl data directory "/tmp/appimage_extracted_9f4f32b23bc1296b3cecfc7ea8798a69/appimagelint/tcl" not found.
[4342] Failed to execute script pyi_rth__tkinter

This is because Tcl and Tkinter are bundled in a different directory. To add them separately, you could add this to pyappimage/pyappimage.json

name: appimagelint
entrypoint: appimagelint.cli:run
categories:
  - Utility
updateinformation: gh-releases-zsync|TheAssassin|appimagelint|latest|appimagelint*.AppImage.zsync
add-data: 
  $APPDIR/usr/share/tcltk/tk8.4: tk
  $APPDIR/usr/share/tcltk/tcl8.4: tcl

I added the folders for tk and tcl from their respective folders. You could append $APPDIR to add a folder from the pyappimage-*.AppImage to your compiled appimage. Or use absolute path, to copy from your host OS to the appimage.

11. Now run it again, And 🎉 it works without errors now!