LÖVE 11.1 AppImage and relative paths

[grump]

I don't want to upgrade my system to 11.1 yet, so I tried the AppImage distribution. I quickly learned that this doesn't work:

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$ love-11.1-linux-x86_64.AppImage game.love

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Error: [string "boot.lua"]:481: Cannot load game at path '/tmp/.mount_AjgSUk/usr/game.love'
Make sure a folder exists at the specified path.

It only works when specifying the absolute path to the love file/game directory. This seems to be a common problem with AppImageKit. See also here.

This doesn't play well with my current build system. I can probably fix this with a shell script, but it would be nice if it worked out of the box and showed the same behavior as when using a vanilla installation. I don't know jack about AppImages, but the above links seem to suggest it can be fixed when building the image.

If there is another quick solution other than writing a script to expand the path, I'd love to know.


Edit: here's the solution I came up with (requires bash):

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#!/bin/bash
GAME="$(readlink -f ${@: -1})"
set -- "${@:1:$(($#-1))}"
love-11.1-linux-x86_64.AppImage $@ $GAME

I saved this as /usr/bin/love11, with the AppImage in the executable path. Makes both absolute and relative paths work.

[bartbes]

Thanks for the links, it looks like AppImageKit sets the OWD environment variable to the working directory it was called in, I'll probably update the script to switch back to that directory.

[grump]

The script hack from above kind of works, but breaks when you use relative package paths. If anyone else is having this problem with the current AppImage, here's how to properly fix it:

• Get the appimagetool AppImage for your system from here
• Unpack the LÖVE AppImage:

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  $ ./love-11.1-linux-x86_64.AppImage --appimage-extract

• Replace squashfs-root/usr/bin/wrapper-love with this script. It's the fixed script from bartbes' repo:

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  #!/bin/sh
  
  # For some reason this runs from the usr subdirectory
  APPIMAGE_DIR="${PWD}/.."
  cd "$OWD"
  exec "${APPIMAGE_DIR}/love" "$@"

• Rebuild the AppImage:

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  $ cd squashfs-root
  $ ~/appimagetool-x86_64.AppImage . /tmp/love-11.1-linux-x86_64.AppImage

You now have a LÖVE AppImage in /tmp that sets the correct working directory.