In order to create an AppImage compatible with a wide range of GNU/Linux systems the developer must choose as build base the oldest LTS system available in the market (which is Centos 6 at the time of writing this post). Why?

An AppImage package is a trade off between size and compatibility where some system libraries are left outside the package for different reasons: glibc doesn’t get well with older or newer versions of itself so if a given application tries to interact with another and they use different versions of glibc a crash is expected. Next time you found a glibc developer please ask them to respect backward and forward compatibility. Other situation is the case of libssl, if embed into the AppImage it may not receive updates and your app could end exposing your network traffic due and old bug.

In resume not all dependencies are bundled but those that are not expected to be present by default in your target systems. So if our application is built over old enough base libs and the libs developers were nice at keeping forward compatibility is guaranteed that your final bundle will run in all the systems with core libraries newer than the ones used tho build the product.

The problem

Sound easy, right? It’s just a matter to build your app on Centos 6 and we are good to go. I’m sorry to tell you that provably there will be no binaries of your dependencies available for Centos 6 and you will have to build it manually and you will also have to deal with weird toolchains to get gcc-7 on it. But don’t despair we are here to help.

The AppImageCarfters initiative aims to be a community driven effort to ease AppImage production. By creating ready to use recipes and binaries of common dependencies and toolchains we want to reduce the work of creating an AppImage to just setting up your app build script and sharing the effort of building dependencies.

In a previous post we show how to conan could help in this task now is time to give a chance to Docker. As a containerization solution it allow us to create a whole system independent from the one started on your machine with really low overheat. So we can create common base system with all requirements to ensure the major compatibility of the produced AppImages, the tools too do it and the common dependencies like frameworks.

And that’s exactly what is apppimagecrafters/docker-linuxdeploy. It gives you a build system with gcc-7, glib-2.44.0, autotools-1.16.1, autoconf-2.69 and cmake-3.15.4 all ready to be used.

Example

Here is an example gitlab-ci script of how it could be used to build an AppImage from a HelloWorld C++-11 application:

build:AppImage:
  image: appimagecrafters/docker-linuxdeploy
  script:
    - cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr
    - DESTDIR=AppDir make install
    - linuxdeploy --appdir=AppDir --output appimage --desktop-file=AppDir/usr/share/applications/net.azubieta.cpp_appimage_template.desktop

Looks great, right? Goodbye to hacks and hello to smooth AppImage creation.

I wonder if it could be simpler than that?

Notice that the application built above is a full desktop app that installs its own desktop entry and icon, which are mandatory requirements for building an AppImage.

Missing dependencies

If one of your dependencies is not in the AppImageCrafters repo you can create a Docker recipe using appimagecrafters/docker-base as base system. Make sure it gets installed into /usr/local by setting it as install prefix. Finally in your target build image use the COPY Docker instruction like this:

COPY --from=me/my-custom-built-library /usr/local /usr/local

You will get all the binaries built on me/my-custom-built-library into your system and as they were built over the same base system there will be no compatibility issues.

Contributing

If you already distribute your app as an AppImage we encourage you to submit the recipes of your dependencies to the project so every one can benefit from them and also contribute.

Are you a Docker expert?. Well, we don’t, so we will love to hear how the recipes can be improved.

Use it, leave your impressions and spread the word. That would be terrific!

Disclaimer

Creating Docker build images for AppImage is a practice long used to build the tools in the AppImageProject and the recipes found on the AppImageCrafters projects were inspired from the ones used by them.

Useful links:

• AppImageCrafters org: https://github.com/AppImageCrafters
• Docker repositories: https://cloud.docker.com/u/appimagecrafters/repository/list
• Example Hello World project: https://www.opencode.net/azubieta/cpp-appimage-template