Adding AppImage build

[ebal]

yarn build:appimage should build the AppImage version of riot-desktop

eg.

$ yarn build:appimage

yarn run v1.22.4
$ electron-builder -l appimage --publish=never
  • electron-builder  version=22.6.1 os=5.4.35-1-lts
  • loaded configuration  file=package.json ("build" field)
  • writing effective config  file=dist/builder-effective-config.yaml
  • packaging       platform=linux arch=x64 electron=8.0.3 appOutDir=dist/linux-unpacked
  • building        target=AppImage arch=x64 file=dist/Riot-1.6.1.AppImage

[AnonymousWebHacker]

Can you make a video of how to build for windows? please?

[ebal]

@AnonymousWebHacker

I am not using windows, so I dont know how to build RiotDesktop for windows.
From what I gathered, electron-builder has instructions on the matter, here
https://www.electron.build/configuration/win#WindowsConfiguration-target

[zilti]

Come on, guys, you can do it! Even I succeeded!

[almereyda]

Since this is a fairly unintrusive and minor change, and natively supported by Electron, if known to work and to be supported with very little overhead, why not include it for convenience?

@zilti In your build, is the .desktop file included in the AppImage, as per https://docs.appimage.org/reference/desktop-integration.html?

[zilti]

Yes, it is included in the AppImage :)

[almereyda]

Beautiful!

From your point of view, would we have to change anything here to get the same result?

[snowc0de]

This was the first thing I was looking for download!

[ebal]

I rebased this patch to upstream.
I am not sure if I need to do something more to get this PR Review/Approved. If I have missed anything, please advice.

I maintain an AppImage version of element-desktop on my personal gitlab project here

Thanks

[zilti]

If you end up merging this and making an official, updateable AppImage, let me know if you want to take over the entry on AppImageHub.com. I am currently keeping that one up-to-date with my version (extracted from the .deb using build.opensuse.org)

[jryans]

I don't really see a need to add this script until / unless there are official AppImage builds. It's makes it seems as if AppImage is supported by the team, but that is not true today.

[ebal]

agreed.

if there are no plans to provide an official element-desktop AppImage build then this line does not make sense to exist in the source code of this repo. In this repo there are no artifacts or builds, except the release of the app.

As this PR is almost a year, I would propose to get some closure with a comment and make acknowledge of the intent.

Perhaps an element-appimage repo would make more sense (as with the other repos) with an auto trigger build every time a new version release is out, but this is a company's decision and no need to get into this in this PR. I see that the only official support is a debian package. My personal opinion and the reason I tried with this PR is that an AppImage (aka an executable archive in a nutshell) can run/work in any linux distro with minimal effort in build and distribution.

best regards,

[CLAassistant]

All committers have signed the CLA.

[ebal]

re-opened after CLA signed.

[dbkr]

Thanks for reopening, although we just discussed this and indeed we just don't have the bandwidth to support an appimage build at this point. Folks can obviously continue building appimages by just running the same command outside of an npm script.