Web applications can be pretty helpful when a native application is unavailable. In today’s tutorial, we will make an AppImage file of a web application using nativefier-appimage. nativefier-appimage makes it very easy to create AppImages of your favorite web applications and share them. It leverages the web application creation process by using nativefier. It packages the resulting web application in an AppImage for portability using appimagetool.
Note: We might change the name if more features are added to the code (if needed).
Difficulty: ★☆☆☆☆
Getting started
To make our AppImage for this tutorial, we need to install npm.
- 🔰 Information: In Nitrux, we recommend using a container to install npm, fuse3, libfuse2 and libfuse3-3. Please check our tutorial on how to use Distrobox to create a container.
Now we need to download nativefier-appimage. After downloading the program, give it execution permissions.
- 🔰 Information: Optionally move it to your $PATH, i.e., /usr/bin, for system-wide access.
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Nitrux/nativefier-appimage/main/nativefier-appimage chmod +x nativefier-appimage sudo mv nativefier-appimage /usr/bin
That’s all we need.
Making a web application
Let’s create a web application now. For this tutorial, we’ll create an AppImage of a WebGL game called HexGL. We only need to run nativefier-appimage, appending the application’s name and URL.
nativefier-appimage HexGL http://hexgl.bkcore.com/play $path_to_icon_or_web_link_to_png
Our AppImage will be created, and now we can move it to ~/Applications to integrate it into the desktop.
To test it, we launch it from the menu.
And it works!
We even have support for using the global menu or the HUD.
That’s it; this concludes today’s tutorial.