How to run an AppImage on NixOS

An AppImage is a very portable format to distribute applications. The idea is to run applications standalone. Usually AppImages are packed in one single package file.

Since AppImages are packages in a special format, your Linux OS needs to know how to run those packages. For NixOS we have a special package for this which is called appimage-run.

To install this package for a single user we can use nix-env:

nix-env -iA nixos.appimage-run

If you have already downloaded an AppImage file (file ending: *.AppImage), you can switch to the folder where you have downloaded the AppImage file and run your image with the appimage-run command on the console / in your terminal:

appimage-run NameOfYourImage.AppImage

You can find another example in my article "How to run the BitBox App on NixOS".