⚙️ Portable rootless xonsh build on AppImage

[anki-code]

AppImage is a format for distributing portable software on Linux without needing superuser permissions to install the application. It tries also to allow Linux distribution-agnostic binary software deployment for application developers, also called Upstream packaging.

AppImage allows xonsh to be run on any AppImage supported Linux distributive without installation and root access.

Try it now

You can download and try prebuilded xonsh.AppImage:

wget https://github.com/anki-code/appimage-xonsh/raw/master/xonsh-x86_64.AppImage && chmod +x xonsh-x86_64.AppImage
./xonsh-x86_64.AppImage
./xonsh-x86_64.AppImage --help

Build xonsh.AppImage

Let's start:

1. Run docker with fuse:

sudo docker run --rm -it --privileged --device /dev/fuse -v `pwd`:/appimage ubuntu:16.04 bash

2. Install libraries for future building:

apt update -y && apt upgrade -y
apt install -y fuse wget mc \
	build-essential python-dev python-setuptools python-pip python-smbus \
	libncursesw5-dev libgdbm-dev libc6-dev  \
	zlib1g-dev libsqlite3-dev tk-dev \
	libssl-dev openssl \
	libffi-dev autoconf libfuse-dev

Not all required. Feel free to clean.

3. Getting the build scripts based on linuxdeploy plugin python:

mkdir -p /appimage && cd /appimage
wget https://github.com/anki-code/linuxdeploy-plugin-python/archive/entrypoint.zip -O linuxdeploy-plugin-python-entrypoint.zip
unzip linuxdeploy-plugin-python-entrypoint.zip

Here we see downloading of entrypoint branch from anki-code/linuxdeploy-plugin-python because the origin niess/linuxdeploy-plugin-python repository has not yet accepted the pull request with xonsh.

4. Building:

cd linuxdeploy-plugin-python-entrypoint/appimage
./build-python.sh xonsh
ls -l

As result you'll find executable file xonsh-x86_64.AppImage that runs xonsh and can take command line arguments like xonsh:

# ./xonsh-x86_64.AppImage -c "echo @(1+1)"
2

Enjoy!

Troubleshooting

GLIBs versions

You can noticed that we build AppImage in docker with older version of Ubuntu (16.04) to avoid error with core libraries versions when binary compiled on modern version can't use older version of libraries. In this nasty case you can see the error like /xonsh-x86_64.AppImage: /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6: version GLIBC_2.25 not found (required by /ppp/xonsh-x86_64.AppImage). This means you should rebuild the AppImage for older version of distributive. If you know how to fix it once and forever feel free to tell us.

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)

Need WSL support:

wsl$ ./xonsh-x86_64.AppImage
fuse: device not found, try 'modprobe fuse' first

Cannot mount AppImage, please check your FUSE setup.
You might still be able to extract the contents of this AppImage
if you run it with the --appimage-extract option.
See https://github.com/AppImage/AppImageKit/wiki/FUSE
for more information
open dir error: No such file or directory

Workaround is extracting appimage and run manually:

wsl$ ./xonsh --appimage-extract
wsl$ ./squashfs-root/usr/bin/python3.7

[anki-code]

@scopatz @adqm @melund @gforsyth

• please use this PoC to build AppImage in regular basis and add it to AppImage Hub and AppImages list
• please review the xonsh recipe to check that appropriate packages and libs are included

@probonopd tag you just for info and your fun :)

And many thanks to @niess for linuxdeploy-plugin-python

[scopatz]

Thanks for this @anki-code! This is really neat to see! Can you maybe make the gif into an asciinema instead, so it can be hosted elsewhere and not go into the repo. Then please open up another branch and copy the doc file in. You can use the rST .. raw directive to include the embed code for the asciinema

[anki-code]

@scopatz please review #3358 :)

[scopatz]

Thanks again!