The script in this git repository can be used (on a sufficiently old linux system) to extract LÓVE binaries, and turn them into a portable build in various different formats.

This project is split up into multiple parts, and each part is responsible for a different build. Note that the tarball build is used as a base for the other builds.

tarball

tarball contains a build script that extracts the love version currently installed on the system together with its dependencies to form a portable build. It also creates a small wrapper script that does the correct search path manipulations to be able to run the build.

Lastly, it contains the icon and a stubbed desktop file.

snap

snap builds.. well, a snap. Instead of using fancy build tools that try to do everything for you, why not just do it manually?! Seriously though, you can still use snapcraft to build this, but at that point it just acts like a fancy mksquashfs, and an extra dependency at that.

NOTE: I haven't been able to run the built snaps yet, but that seems to be a driver issue, possibly related to Arch Linux. Let me know if it works for you!

appimage

appimage builds AppImages, unsurprisingly. It uses binaries from AppImageKit, though you can build them yourself if you want to. And hey, this actually seems to work, too!

flatpak

flatpak is used to build flatpak "packages". It requires the flatpak command line tool. Of course flatpak has some kind of repo system, so you can't easily distribute a flatpak file. Useful.

NOTE: Once again driver issues (blame nvidia) prevent me from testing this myself. If you get it working, let me know!

docker

docker does not build docker images. Instead it builds a docker image so you can build portable packages yourself!

To build the container, you need to download the relevant SDL2 and LuaJIT source packages (and possibly update the references in the Dockerfile).

To use the container, run it as an application, mounting this repo as /build/love-linux-builder. You can optionally mount love source at /build/love, and if no source is provided it clones the repo and checks out the specified version. Note that the container requires exactly one argument: the version. This can be an arbitrary string, but for cloning to work it needs to be a tag, branch or commit.