A Linux portable AppImage builder for BitTorrent Sync
The built AppImage will include the GUI created for the Debian BitTorrent Sync Package.
The AppImage is (hopefully) built in such a way that would enable it to run on many Linux distributions. That being said, it had only been tested on the following OSes so far:
- Fedora 20
- Ubuntu 14.10
- RHEL/CentOS 7.x
The binary downloadable AppImage was also tested and shown not to run on the following OSes. It is quite likely that running the build system on those OSes will result in a working AppImage for them:
- RHEL/CentOS 6.x
Binary components included in the AppImage are currently compatible only with 64bit intel-based processors (x86-64). Patches to add components for other platforms are welcome.
Ideally the AppImage created by this script would require nothing but a minimal desktop user space on top of a Linux kernel. But for now, in order to keep the image size down, I chose not to bundle the following components, which I assume are available on most Linux desktops:
- Python 2
- PyGTK
Apart from the main components mentioned above, the following libraries are also bundled as part of the generated AppImage. There is no need to install them on the build system as the sources are downloaded and built by the build process.
The script in this repo is a build system. It requires the following components to work:
- Paver - Available on RPM-based distributions as 'python-paver'
- C compilation toolchain - For building Python extension libraries
- cmake - For building AppImageKit
- fuse development libraries - Also for AppImageKit. It available as the 'fuse-devel' PRM package
- Vala compiler - For building libc compatibility tool. It is available is the 'vala-devel' RPM package
- libgee - Also for building the Vala-based libc compatibility tool. Available as the 'libgee-devel' RPM package. The tool requires version 0.8 of the libgee API (Which is paradoxically newer then the 1.0 version). On Ubuntu this requires the 'libgee-0.8-devel' package. For older Ubunto versions it is available from the Vala PPA.
- A working internet connection - To enable the script to download additional stuff it needs
To build the AppImage, run the following command:
paver mk_appimage
Once the build process is done, the AppImage would be in the following path:
build/btsync-app-x86_64-*
The AppImage is a binary executable file, it can be copied and run anywhere.