Running an AppImage

If you try to run an AppImage with the usual ./application-name invocation, you'll find that they won't run. This is because the AppImage runtime expects some files to exist in a global location that NixOS doesn't put there.

In practice, this is usually not a problem - in most cases, you can use appimage-run to run an AppImage on NixOS. appimage-run is a tool that creates a virtual environment with all the stuff that an AppImage expects to be there, and then runs it within that environment for you.

To run an AppImage called application-name, you should ensure that appimage-run is installed into your environment (eg. by adding it to your systemPackages), and then run:

appimage-run ./application-name

In some cases, this doesn't work either. That usually happens when the AppImage expects some additional library to exist on the system, but the appimage-run environment doesn't have it. On most Linux distributions, this would be fixed by installing the library it wants, but on NixOS that's a little more complicated. This guide doesn't currently cover that case (yet), and for now I would recommend to try another approach in this chapter instead.