Gnocl -the Tcl/Gtk Bindings: Is it possible to open an Ubuntu app from HTML?

Wednesday, April 23, 2025

Is it possible to open an Ubuntu app from HTML?

An excellent description on how to launch Linux applications from within a HTML document.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/330937/is-it-possible-to-open-an-ubuntu-app-from-html

1. Create application launcher script

In a terminal run:
```
mkdir -p bin
```
This command will make a bin directory in your home folder if you don't already have it.
After run:
```
gedit ~/bin/open_app.sh
```
This will create the new file open_app.sh in gedit.

Copy and paste the following script in the new created file:

#!/bin/bash

if [[ "$1" != "app://" ]]; then 
    app=${1#app://}
    nohup "$app" &>/dev/null &
else 
    nohup gnome-terminal &>/dev/null &
fi

Save the file and close it.
Go back into terminal and run:
```
chmod +x ~/bin/open_app.sh
```
to grant execute access for the script.

2. Create .desktop file for application launcher

Now you must create a .desktop launcher for the above script, and tell Ubuntu to use this launcher as app:// protocol handler. Create /usr/share/applications/appurl.desktop file using the following command:

sudo -H gedit /usr/share/applications/appurl.desktop

and add the following content:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=TerminalURL
Exec=/home/radu/bin/open_app.sh %u
Type=Application
NoDisplay=true
Categories=System;
MimeType=x-scheme-handler/app;

Save the file and close it.

3. Refresh mime types database

In the file above, the line MimeType=x-scheme-handler/app; register app:// scheme handler, but to make it work we should update mime types database cache by executing command:

sudo update-desktop-database

4. Test from terminal

Now everything should work. To test that it works from terminal, run for example this command:

xdg-open 'app://gedit'

4. Test from browser using HTML

You can test from browser by using for example the following HTML web page:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">

<head>
    <title>Open some applications</title>
    <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />
</head>

<body>
        <h3>Open some applications in Ubuntu from HTML</h3>
        <p>Open terminal: <a title="Open" href="app://">app://</a>
        (equivalent with: <a title="Open" href="app://gnome-terminal">app://gnome-terminal</a>)</p>
        <p>Open Nautilus: <a title="Open" href="app://nautilus">app://nautilus</a></p>
        <p>Open Chromium: <a title="Open" href="app://chromium-browser">app://chromium-browser</a></p>
        <p>Open Ubuntu Software Center: <a title="Open" href="app://software-center">app://software-center</a>
        (equivalent with: <a title="Open" href="apt://">apt://</a>)</p>
        <p>...and so on</p>
</body>

</html>

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