appimaged

appimaged

This is an experimental implementation of the optional AppImage daemon, appimaged, in Go.

Initial setup

Assuming you are using a 64-bit Intel machine (arm64, also known as x86_64), you can use our pre-compiled binaries. To try it out, boot a Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, elementary OS, KDE neon,... Live ISO and run:

# Remove pre-existing similar tools
systemctl --user stop appimaged.service || true
sudo apt-get -y remove appimagelauncher || true

# Clear cache
rm "$HOME"/.local/share/applications/appimage*

# Optionally, install Firejail (if you want sandboxing functionality)

# Download
mkdir -p ~/Applications
wget -c https://github.com/$(wget -q https://github.com/probonopd/go-appimage/releases -O - | grep "appimaged-.*-x86_64.AppImage" | head -n 1 | cut -d '"' -f 2) -P ~/Applications/
chmod +x ~/Applications/appimaged-*.AppImage

# Launch
~/Applications/appimaged-*.AppImage

Removal

systemctl --user stop appimaged.service || true
sudo rm /etc/systemd/user/appimaged.service
rm ~/.local/share/applications/appimagekit*.desktop
rm ~/Applications/appimaged-*-x86_64.AppImage

Notes

Do not remove "~/Applications/appimaged*.AppImage". The service is running from this location (unless you want to do the uninstallation process)

The extension of AppImage files MUST be case-sensitive to be recognized by appimaged service.

Folders being watched for AppImage files:

• /usr/local/bin
• /opt
• ~/Applications
• ~/.local/bin
• $PATH, which frequently includes /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin, /usr/local/bin, /usr/local/sbin, and other locations

https://github.com/probonopd/go-appimage/releases/tag/continuous has builds for 32-bit Intel, 32-bit ARM (e.g., Raspberry Pi), and 64-bit ARM.

Features

Implemented

• Registers type-1 and type-2 AppImages
• Detects mounted and unmounted partitions by watching DBus
• Significantly lower CPU and memory usage than other implementations
• Error notifications in case applications cannot be launched for whatever reason
• If Firejail is on the $PATH, various options for running applications sandboxed via the context menu
• Updating applications via the context menu
• Opening the containing folder via the context menu
• Extracting AppImages via the context menu
• Announces itself on the local network using Zeroconf (more to come)
• Real-time notification based on PubSub when updates are available, as soon as they are uploaded
• Quality checking of AppImages and notifications in case of errors (can be extended)
• Launch Services like functionality, e.g., being able to launch the newest version of an AppImage that we know of

Envisioned

• Seamless P2P distribution using IPFS?
• Decentralized PubSub using IPFS?
• Web-of-trust (based on a Social Graph)?
• Blockchain?
• ...

Building

If for whatever reason you would like to build from source:

sudo apt-get -y install gcc 
if [ -z $GOPATH ] ; then export GOPATH=$HOME/go ; fi
go get github.com/probonopd/go-appimage/src/appimaged 
go build -trimpath -ldflags="-s -w" github.com/probonopd/go-appimage/src/appimaged