Appimage Updater

Simple CLI app to manage apps that are not in a repository and are supposed to be downloaded from things like github releases.

Install

npm install -g @d219/update-appimage

Usage

Update all installed apps

update-appimage

This will auto detect which apps were installed by this app, check if a new version was released, and download it.

List apps

update-appimage --list

This will print a list of all supported apps, if the app is installed, it will add [installed] and the current version of the app behind it.

Example:

$ update-appimage --list
chiaki [installed] (v1.3.0)
cozy-drive [installed] (v1.34.0)
etcher
keepassxc [installed] (Release 2.6.4)
pendulums [installed] (v1.1.0)
vscodium [installed] (1.55.0)

You can also ask for only the installed apps:

$ update-appimage --list --installed
cozy-drive
keepassxc
vscodium
chiaki
pendulums

Install a new app

update-appimage --install app

If no other flag is set, --install is presupposed, so this is also valid:

update-appimage app

Support

The installation will put the app in the default npm global path, if you need to find it, you should be able to do so by looking at the cwd property when executing npm config list. You should then find it under @d219/update-appimage.

If you need to modify something like where the binaries and softlink are stored, you should edit the config/global.json file and change the storage property.

If need be, you can also find the version.json file there, which tracks which app is installed and at which version it is.

This app never delete anything, when updating, it download the new appimage, but keeps all previously downloaded versions in their respectives binDir (usually named after the appimage, but capitalized). If something breaks, you can delete the alias and recreate the softlink to an older version:

rm ~/bin/app
ln -s bin/App/app-older.AppImage bin/app

Contribute

Support a new app

Simply add a new file named after the new app in the config folder. Those files are JSON, and are formatted depending on the source property. The name of the file will determine the name it will have in the installation/update command.

Github

github is used to fetch an app in the github releases, chiaki for example.

{
    "source": "github",
    "alias": "chiaki",      // How the command will be named
    "binDir": "Chiaki",     // In which folder will the binaries be stored
    "owner": "thestr4ng3r", // Owner of the github repo
    "repo": "chiaki"        // Name of the github repo
}

Github tracked version

Used for apps where the current version can be fetched from github, but the official source for the app image is somewhere else, cozy-drive for example.

{
    "source": "github-tracked-version",
    "alias": "cozy",                                                // How the command will be named
    "binDir": "Cozy",                                               // In which folder will the appimages be stored
    "owner": "cozy",                                                // Owner of the github repo
    "repo": "cozy-drive",                                           // Name of the github repo
    "name": "CozyDrive",                                            // How to name the appimage once downloaded
    "url": "https://nuts.cozycloud.cc/download/channel/stable/64"   // Where to download the latest appimage
}

Flags

If for some reason, an app needs some flags to be set to works (for example, electron-based apps on a Linux core that doesn't properly support sandbox), a flags property can be set in the config file. This will generate both a app-no-flags with the direct link to the app, and a executable script that will start it with the given flags.

For example:

{
    "binDir": "VSCodium",
    "alias": "codium",
    "source": "github",
    "owner": "VSCodium",
    "repo": "vscodium",
    "flags": "--no-sandbox"
}

will generate the codium-no-flags executable that works as in other apps, and codium that will start it with the --no-sandbox flag.