AppImage

AppImage is a distribution format that does not rely on the system installed packages and instead bundles all dependencies and files needed by the application. For this reason, the output file is larger but easier to distribute since it is supported on many Linux distributions and can be executed without installation. The user just needs to make the file executable (chmod a+x MyProject.AppImage) and can then run it (./MyProject.AppImage).

AppImages are convenient, simplifying the distribution process if you cannot make a package targeting the distribution’s package manager. Still, you should carefully use it as the file size grows from the 2-6 MB range to 70+ MB.

Note

GUI apps on macOS and Linux do not inherit the $PATH from your shell dotfiles (.bashrc, .bash_profile, .zshrc, etc). Check out Tauri’s fix-path-env-rs crate to fix this issue.

Limitations

Core libraries such as glibc frequently break compatibility with older systems. For this reason, you must build your Tauri application using the oldest base system you intend to support. A relatively old system such as Ubuntu 18.04 is more suited than Ubuntu 22.04, as the binary compiled on Ubuntu 22.04 will have a higher requirement of the glibc version, so when running on an older system, you will face a runtime error like /usr/lib/libc.so.6: version 'GLIBC_2.33' not found. We recommend using a Docker container or GitHub Actions to build your Tauri application for Linux.

See the issues tauri-apps/tauri#1355 and rust-lang/rust#57497, in addition to the AppImage guide for more information.

Multimedia support via GStreamer

If your app plays audio/video you need to enable tauri.conf.json > bundle > linux > appimage > bundleMediaFramework. This will increase the size of the AppImage bundle to include additional gstreamer files needed for media playback. This flag is currently only fully supported on Ubuntu build systems. Make sure that your build system has all the plugins your app may need at runtime.

Caution

GStreamer plugins in the ugly package are licensed in a way that may make it hard to distribute them as part of your app.

Custom Files

To include custom files in the AppImage that you do not want to include via Tauri’s resources feature, you can provide a list of files or folders in tauri.conf.json > bundle > linux > appimage > files. The configuration object maps the path in the AppImage to the path to the file on your filesystem, relative to the tauri.conf.json file. Here’s an example configuration:

tauri.conf.json

{
  "bundle": {
    "linux": {
      "appimage": {
        "files": {
          "/usr/share/README.md": "../README.md", // copies the ../README.md file to <appimage>/usr/share/README.md
          "/usr/assets": "../assets/" // copies the entire ../assets directory to <appimage>/usr/assets
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

Note

Note that the destination paths must currently begin with /usr/.

AppImages for ARM-based devices

linuxdeploy, the AppImage tooling Tauri uses, currently does not support cross-compiling ARM AppImages. This means ARM AppImages can only be built on ARM devices or emulators.

Check out our GitHub Action guide for an example workflow that leverages QEMU to build the app. Note that this is extremely slow and only recommended in public repositories where Build Minutes are free. In private repositories GitHub’s ARM runners should be more cost-efficient and much easier to set up.