appimaged

appimaged is an optional daemon that watches locations like ~/bin and ~/Downloads for AppImages and if it detects some, registers them with the system, so that they show up in the menu, have their icons show up, MIME types associated, etc. It also unregisters AppImages again from the system if they are deleted. Optionally you can use a sandbox if you like: If the firejail sandbox is installed, it runs the AppImages with it.

Install

A precompiled version can be found in the last successful Travis CI build, you can get it with:

wget "https://github.com/AppImage/appimaged/releases/download/continuous/appimaged-x86_64.AppImage"
chmod a+x appimaged-x86_64.AppImage

Usage in a nutshell:

./appimaged-x86_64.AppImage --install

Or, if you are on a deb-based system:

# Download the .deb file from https://github.com/AppImage/appimaged/releases
sudo dpkg -i appimaged_*.deb
systemctl --user add-wants default.target appimaged
systemctl --user start appimaged

Monitored directories

appimaged will register the AppImages in with your system from the following places:

• $HOME/Downloads (or its localized equivalent, as determined by G_USER_DIRECTORY_DOWNLOAD in glib)
• $HOME/.local/bin
• $HOME/bin
• $HOME/Applications
• /Applications
• /Applications
• /opt
• /usr/local/bin

Usage

Usage:
  appimaged [OPTION...] 

Help Options:
  -h, --help          Show help options

Application Options:
  -v, --verbose       Be verbose
  -i, --install       Install this appimaged instance to $HOME
  -u, --uninstall     Uninstall an appimaged instance from $HOME
  --version           Show version number

Run appimaged -v for increased verbosity.

NOTE: It may be necessary to restart (or xkill) dash, nautilus, to recognize new directories that didn't exist prior to the first run of appimaged. Alternatively, it should be sufficient to log out of the session and log in again after having run appimaged once.

Use AppImageUpdate with appimaged

If you have AppImageUpdate on your $PATH, then it can also do this neat trick:

Download AppImageUpdate from https://github.com/AppImage/AppImageUpdate/releases/tag/continuous and put on your $PATH:

sudo mv "Downloads/AppImageUpdate-*.AppImage" /usr/local/bin/AppImageUpdate
chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/AppImageUpdate

Build

appimaged is built using CMake.

You can build appimaged as follows:

# Optional if your CMake is not recent enough
# wget https://github.com/Kitware/CMake/releases/download/v3.12.4/cmake-3.12.4-Linux-x86_64.tar.gz -O - | sudo tar -xz -C /usr/local --strip-components=1
sudo apt install git cmake make g++ autoconf libtool pkg-config libglib2.0-dev libcairo2-dev libfuse-dev
git clone --recursive https://github.com/AppImage/appimaged/
cd appimaged/
git submodule update --init --recursive
mkdir build/
cd build/
cmake ..
make