bdist_appimage¶

An AppImage is a downloadable file for Linux that contains an application and everything the application needs to run (e.g., libraries, icons, fonts, translations, etc.) that cannot be reasonably expected to be part of each target system.

AppImages are simple to understand. Every AppImage is a regular file, and every AppImage contains exactly one app with all its dependencies. Once the AppImage is made executable, a user can just run it, either by double clicking it in their desktop environment’s file manager, by running it from the console etc.

It is crucial to understand that AppImage is merely a format for distributing applications. In this regard, AppImage is like a .zip file or an .iso file.

When cx_Freeze calls appimagetool to create an AppImage application bundle (an .AppImage file), it builds a read-only image of a build_exe directory, then prepends the runtime, and marks the file executable.

option name	description
appimagekit¶	path to AppImageKit [default: the latest version is downloaded]
bdist_base¶	base directory for creating built distributions
build_dir (-b)¶	directory of built executables and dependent files
dist_dir (-d)¶	directory to put final built distributions in [default: dist]
skip_build¶	skip rebuilding everything (for testing/debugging)
target_name¶	name of the file to create; if the name ends with “.AppImage” then it is used verbatim, otherwise, information about the program version and platform will be added to the installer name [default: use metadata name or name of the first executable].
target_version¶	version of the file to create [default: metadata version if available]
silent (-s)¶	suppress all output except warnings

Added in version 7.0.

To specify the same options on the command line, this is the help command that shows the equivalent options:

python setup.py bdist_appimage --help