Bundling your Travis CI builds as AppImages

Services such as Travis CI make it easy to build software automatically whenever a new commit is pushed to the source code repository. How you turn your build products into an AppImage depends on how your application is built. Generally there are two main methods, namely producing an application directory, and using tools to automate the process.

Producing an application directory using bash scripts

Some types of applications can best be converted into application directories using custom bash script. However, to facilitate this, there is a collection of convenience functions in https://github.com/AppImage/pkg2appimage/blob/master/functions.sh which can use in your own scripts.

Todo

Document the functions in functions.sh that are for public consumption based on comments in the file.

Note

For most types of applications, especially those compiled with compilers such as gcc or g++ using a tool like linuxdeploy user guide is much easier than doing this in a bash script because it automates much of the process.

Producing an application directory using linuxdeploy

Please refer to the chapter Packaging from source.

For general information on linuxdeploy, see linuxdeploy user guide.

Uploading the generated AppImage

Once an Appimage has been generated, you want to upload it to GitHub Releases. For this, you can use the upload.sh script available in the uploadtool repository.

Note

It is best practice to upload binaries (such as AppImages) to GitHub Releases rather than committing them into the repository itself.

Super simple uploading of continuous builds (each push) to GitHub Releases. If this is not the easiest way to upload continuous builds to GitHub Releases, then it is a bug.

Using upload.sh

The upload.sh script in the uploadtool repository is designed to be called from Travis CI after a successful build. By default, this script will delete any pre-existing release tagged with continuous, tag the current state with the name continuous, create a new release with that name, and upload the specified binaries there. For pull requests, it will upload the binaries to transfer.sh instead and post the resulting download URL to the pull request page on GitHub.

  • On https://github.com/settings/tokens, click on “Generate new token” and generate a token with at least the public_repo, repo:status, and repo_deployment scopes

  • On Travis CI, go to the settings of your project at https://travis-ci.org/yourusername/yourrepository/settings

  • Under “Environment Variables”, add key GITHUB_TOKEN and the token you generated above as the value. Make sure that “Display value in build log” is set to “OFF”!

  • In the .travis.yml of your GitHub repository, add something like this (assuming the build artifacts to be uploaded are in out/):

after_success:
  - ls -lh out/* # Assuming you have some files in out/ that you would like to upload
  - wget -c https://github.com/probonopd/uploadtool/raw/master/upload.sh
  - bash upload.sh out/*

branches:
  except:
    - # Do not build tags that we create when we upload to GitHub Releases
    - /^(?i:continuous)$/

Environment variables

upload.sh normally only creates one stream of continuous releases for the latest commits that are pushed into (or merged into) the repository.

It’s possible to use upload.sh in a more complex manner by setting the environment variable UPLOADTOOL_SUFFIX. If this variable is set to the name of the current tag, then upload.sh will upload a release to the repository (basically reproducing the deploy: feature in .travis.yml).

If UPLOADTOOL_SUFFIX is set to a different text, then this text is used as suffix for the continuous tag that is created for continuous releases. This way, a project can customize what releases are being created.

One possible use case for this is to set up continuous builds for feature or test branches:

if [ ! -z $TRAVIS_BRANCH ] && [ "$TRAVIS_BRANCH" != "master" ] ; then
    export UPLOADTOOL_SUFFIX=$TRAVIS_BRANCH
fi

This will create builds tagged with continuous for pushes/merges to master and with continuous-<branch-name> for pushes / merges to other branches.

The two environment variables UPLOADTOOL_PR_BODY and UPLOADTOOL_BODY allow the calling script to customize the messages that are posted either for pull requests or merges/pushes. If these variables aren’t set, generic default texts are used.