I have a Python-package that calls Inkscape as part of a conversion process. I have it installed, but through Flatpak. This means that calling inkscape
does not work in the terminal, but rather flatpak run org.inkscape.Inkscape
. I need the package to be able to call it as inkscape
.
What is the best way to go about this?
You can do an alias for the shell you use or make a symlink to /usr/local/bin/ for the entire system.
There are importany reasons why this is not the default, but you can do it as long as you are away you have done it. Like when programs installed via package manager and flatpak starts conflicting, you’ll know why.
You can use symbolic links, alias…
I actually didn’t know about the symbolic link meathod. Thanks!
Put a shell script in your PATH named inkscape with the following content:
#!/bin/sh flatpak run org.inkscape.Inkscape
Or instead just make it an alias in your .bashrc
How does this deal with any flags passed?
If you need to pass flags you can use
flatpak run org.inkscape.Inkscape "$@"
To forward all of the arguments to the script. Note that this might be a bashism, so you might need to change your hash bang to /bin/bash as well. Double check though.
(An easy way to check if something is working as you assume is just prepend the line with echo.)
This is not a bashism. It’ll work fine with any sh.
alias inkscape="flatpak run org.inkscape.Inkscape"
into your.bashrc
.Yeah, I tried this, and it works from my session, but I still got the same error from trying to run the program. I figured it was because it is called outside the bash session so the run commands have not been run, but is that perhaps not true?
If that’s the case, it’s a bit of an ugly hack but you could make a wrapper script placed in
/usr/local/bin/inkscape
like this:#!/bin/bash flatpack run org.inkscape.Inkscape ${*}
(the
${*}
will pass along all the arguments that the wrapper script was called with)
alias?
Flatpak already creates executable wrappers for all applications as part of regular installs, though they’re by default named as the full package name.
For when inkscape has been installed into the system-wide Flatpak installation, you could simply symlink it like;
ln -s /var/lib/flatpak/exports/bin/org.inkscape.Inkscape /usr/local/bin/inkscape
For the user-local installation, the exported runnable is in
~/.local/share/flatpak/exports/bin
instead.I handle it more like
ln -s /var/lib/flatpak/exports/bin/org.inkscape.Inkscape ~/.local/bin/inkscape
.local/bin is a directory that you may have to make, but your shell’s startup scripts should automatically add it to the PATH after that.
Two utilities that may be handy for you here:
Pakrat: Automates and simplifies the process of creating alliases for flatpaks, good if you just need to make a few programs be simplified
Fuzzpak: Lets you do fuzzy searches for flatpaks(as in you just write fuzzpak inkscape and it auto looks for something with inkscape in the flatpak folder and launches it), good for when you want to simplify launching flatpaks in general without doing the process of configuring stuff manually