python-appimage

AppImage distributions of Python

Ready to use AppImages of Python are available as GitHub releases.

Quickstart

Our AppImages provide relocatable Python runtimes. Installation is as simple as downloading a single file and changing its mode to executable, e.g. as:

wget https://github.com/niess/python-appimage/releases/download/\
python3.8/python3.8.2-cp38-cp38-manylinux1_x86_64.AppImage
chmod +x python3.8.2-cp38-cp38-manylinux1_x86_64.AppImage

./python3.8.2-cp38-cp38-manylinux1_x86_64.AppImage

This should run Python 3.8 on almost any Linux provided that fuse is available. Note that on WSL1 since fuse is not supported you will need to extract the AppImage as explained hereafter.

The installation mode described previously is enough if you only need vanilla Python with its standard library. However, if you plan to install extra packages we recommmed extracting the AppImage, e.g. as:

./python3.8.2-cp38-cp38-manylinux1_x86_64.AppImage --appimage-extract
mv squashfs-root python3.8.2-cp38-cp38-manylinux1_x86_64.AppDir
rm -f python3.8.2-cp38-cp38-manylinux1_x86_64.AppImage

ln -s python3.8.2-cp38-cp38-manylinux1_x86_64.AppDir/AppRun python3.8

Then, extra packages can be installed to the extracted AppDir using pip. For example updating pip can be done as:

./python3.8 -m pip install -U pip