I nerd-sniped myself today. All I wanted to do was installing SuperSonic, a subsonic compatible music player written in go. One of their recommended ways to run it is an AppImage.

An AppImage is basically an ELF executable which contains a SquashFS with the application and all dependencies it needs. It’s a simple way to distribute a Linux binary.

Running an AppImage is super simple. You download it, you make it executable you start it.

But for graphical tools, you probably want it integrated into your system’s menu with a nice icon. For that you need to copy the AppImage to a more permanent location than your download folder, create a .desktop file in .local/share/applications and also place an icon in .local/share/icons. Now you need to remember the .desktop specification and also need to find a proper icon for your app. All not very difficult but tedious.

So I looked into available AppImage “installers” that would automate this process. I wasn’t happy with what I found. It all seemed more complicated than what I wanted.

So I spent a few hours co-working with Claude to come up with my own solution called “Appy”. It’s a single go binary which can install and register itself as default handler for .AppImage files.

Once installed, you can download the AppImage, double click it in your file manager and get a single button to “install” it.

You click the button, the AppImage is copied to ~/Applications, chmod’ed and the icon and desktop file are extracted from the AppImage itself and installed at the right places. And when you later want to “uninstall” the app again, you right click it in your ~/Applications folder, select “Open with… Appy” and you can uninstall it with another click of a button.

You can find Appy at Github.