flatpak2appdir

A proof of concept to demonstrate a viable way to turn a Flatpak into AppDir, just pass a flatpak app as argument and this tool generate

How to use?

1. Download

wget https://github.com/sudo-give-me-coffee/flatpak2appdir/archive/master.zip -O flatpak2appdir.zip

2. Unzip

unzip flatpak2appdir.zip

3. Enter on repository dir:

cd flatpak2appdir-master

4. Turn executable:

chmod +x flatpak2appdir

5. Run as root:

sudo ./flatpak2appdir com.example.app

Note: to do these steps flatpak2appdir will create a .img file with the runtime name, you can delete this after AppDir creation

How to use?

It's working by chrooting under runtime of app and mapping used files using strictatime and nodiratime and copying to AppDir

How much overhead on the resulting AppDir?

In general, about 8 to 10 MB, the resulting AppDir when and if sanitized and compressed as AppImage in my tests will use disk space close to that of the original application without the main runtime (application files + ostree objects)

Missing features

This is a PoC, so it has a large list of missing features:

• Find executable dinamically (currently generated AppRun only looks at /app/bin)
• Support non binary apps
• Enable dconf and dbus during test phase
• Support to apps that depends of libexecs but doesn't load them automatically
• Support no required runtimes