love-linux-builder/Getting Started.md

As I've been getting a lot of questions on how to actually use the scripts in this repository, here is some more information to get you started.

Building a portable love distribution using the docker container

By far the easiest way to build a portable tarball, AppImage and Snap is by using the docker container. You can build the container yourself (see docker build) but I recommend saving yourself some time and effort and using the container from DockerHub. A (complete!) example of how to use this is as follows:

docker run --rm -v /path/to/repo:/build/love-linux-builder bartbes/love-linux-builder:x86_64 0.10.2

The docker container runs the script located in docker/build.sh, but here's a brief overview:

• The existing repo is used. Both so you can customise the scripts, or the resulting builds see building portable game distributions. The path is set using the -v /path/to/repo:/build/love-linux-builder argument, as seen above. Here the first part is the path to this repo on your local machine, and the second part is the destination path in the container. All resulting build artifacts end up in the repo.

• The argument passed to the script (in the example 0.10.2) is used to determine the version for the scripts. If there is no matching tarball, the container will build one.

• If building a tarball, it will first see if /build/love contains a love(-like) repository. If not, it clones the main love repo. This is a customisation point if you want to use a modified build of love. To specify your own repo, you can specify an argument to docker run as follows: -v /path/to/love-repo:/build/love

• The container will now build a Snap and an AppImage. Unfortunately, the Flatpak script is not supported, as Flatpak does not run on a distro this old.

Building a portable love distribution manually

The first step in getting building portable binaries is getting a tarball. The rest of the scripts use the tarball as input.

Building a tarball

This is the hardest step of them all. To build a tarball of (mostly) portable binaries, the key is to use the oldest distro you're willing to support. I, and the docker container, use Debian Wheezy (aka Debian 7 aka Debian oldoldstable), as binaries built for it will run on practically any machine reasonably used for running games.

On said distro, build and install love. It is very likely the distro you selected does not have (recent) love packages and lacks some dependency, like SDL2 and LuaJIT. Unfortunately the steps for this are highly distro-specific (and version-specific), so you're on your own for this bit. If you're building from source, make sure to run make install to install love system-wide.

Once you've got love installed on that machine, running the build.sh script in the tarball directory will extract the love binaries and its dependencies and copy them to a directory. It also adds a template desktop file, a love icon and a launcher script that sets up the correct library paths. Surprisingly, it doesn't actually tar the resulting directory.

NOTE: The build script also copies in a license.txt file if it exists. For legal reasons, don't forget to add it!

The rest of the scripts expect a tarball in the tarball directory, which you can now create like this:

tar czf "love-0.10.2-x86_64.tar.gz" dest

Substitute the relevant version number and architecture, of course.

Building an AppImage

Now you've got the tarball, most of the hard work is done. Go to the AppImage directory and run the build script with as single argument the version number as specified in the tarball name. For example:

./build.sh 0.10.2

It will use the current system architecture as target architecture, so if you want to build 32-bit binaries on a 64-bit system you can use the setarch program.

NOTE: The AppImage script automatically downloads some binaries if you don't already have them. In theory, you don't need to install anything to build an AppImage.

Building a Flatpak

Like the AppImage script, building a Flatpak is as easy as running the script with the right version. For example:

./build.sh 0.10.2

It will push the resulting data to a Flatpak repo located in flatpak/repo (can be overridden by setting the REPO environment variable) and it then builds a bundle. To build a Flatpak, you will need to have the Flatpak tools installed.

Building a Snap

The Snap script, surprisingly, works exactly the same as the others. For example:

./build.sh 0.10.2

Unfortunately, the Snap is the least complete. If you're looking to build a proper snap, you probably need to customise the YAML file snap/snap.yaml. Like the AppImage script, it requires no snap-specific dependencies, though it does require the SquashFS tools to be installed (in particular mksquashfs). Most distros provide the tools in their repos, and they're even commonly pre-installed.

Building portable game distributions

The AppImage and Flatpak scripts provide customisation points so you can build distributions of your game instead. All these files need to go in the root directory of the repo.

Note from lynnesbian: This means that if you cloned this repo to /home/you/love-linux-builder, then the files below should also be in /home/you/love-linux-builder.

Both AppImage and Flatpak:

• game.love: A .love file of your game. Will be fused with the love binary in the resulting AppImage/Flatpak.

• game.desktop.in: A desktop file for your game. See tarball/love.desktop.in for inspiration. Note that you want to specify %BINARY% as application name and %ICON% as icon name, since the scripts will override these with the relevant paths.

• game.svg: An icon for your game. Used both for the desktop file and for the metadata.

Flatpak only:

• game.rdns: A reverse domain name that identifies your game. Love itself uses org.love2d.love. I strongly discourage using the love domain name. Please be a nice citizen of the internet and use your own domain name.

• game.version: A version number to display in the application metadata.

Note from lynnesbian: These files are required to include your game in the Flatpak - without them, the generated Flatpak will just execute löve without running your game, as if you had executed love instead of love game.love!

For Snap users there is no inbuilt customisation at the moment. You can modify snap/snap.yaml.