I wanted to add AppImage programs to my launcher without installing binaries.

Installation

Copy appimage-install.sh to your machine and make it available in path:

git clone https://github.com/af0bl/appimage-install
ln -s $(realpath appimage-install/appimage-install.sh) $HOME/.local/bin/appimage-install

Usage

Invoke the script passing one argument, an absolute path where you keep the AppImage file to be installed.

appimage-install /home/af0bl/.local/appimages/MyProgram.AppImage"

Details

The script:

• Unzips the appimage into ./appimage-tmp
• Copies icons from ./appimage-tmp to $HOME/.local/share/icons
• Modifies the extracted .desktop file such that the Exec line points to the AppImage path you passed in $1
• Copies that .desktop file into $HOME/.local/share/applications
• Deletes ./appimage-tmp

Some systems may require manually refreshing the desktop files with e.g. update-desktop-database.