matthewbauer / nix-bundle

hello indicates the Nix derivation from NixPkgs that you want to use, while /bin/hello indicates the path of the executable relative to hello that you want to run. This will create the file "hello". Running it:

This is a standalone file that is completely portable! As long as you are running the same architecture Linux kernel and have a shell interpreter available it will run.

"nix-bundle.sh" tends to create fairly large outputs. This is largely because nix-bundle.sh "extracts" its payload up front. AppImage uses a different method where extraction only takes place when the file is accessed (through FUSE and SquashFS). You can now create a compliant "AppImage" using the "nix2appimage.sh" script:

Notice that there is only one argument for nix2appimage.sh. This is because the target executable will be detected from the .desktop file in /share/applications/*.desktop. As a side-effect, AppImage requires your package to have a .desktop file, so packages like "hello", "coreutils", etc. will not work.

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