Creating a desktop/menu/UI entries for running app on Ubuntu Desktop

 Introduction

Let’s get some context. We downloaded for example postman from official site. For Ubuntu it’s usually an *.tar.gz archive. Let’s unpack that: 

tar -xvzf postman.tar.gz

and now we have a directory in which we can find a file for running Postman with double-click method, but we still don’t have a menu entry for easy running it without going throw explorer (probably nautilus on Ubuntu) to run it. Let’s create this type of entry, final effect will look like that:







Creating an entry

To create this type of entry we have to create a *.desktop file. In this case let’s do it for a specific user we are logged in terminal. We can create file with touch command: 

touch ~/.local/share/applications/postman.desktop

now we can edit the content, for example with nano: 

nano ~/.local/share/applications/postman.desktop

While creating Postman entry file we can use that content (of course we have to change the username and file locations accordingly to our case): 

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Version=1.1
Name=Postman
Comment=Postman Native App
Exec=/home/username/Downloads/Postman/Postman — %u
Icon=/home/username/Downloads/Postman/app/icons/icon_128x128.png
Terminal=false
StartupWMClass=postman
Type=Application
Categories=Network;
MimeType=x-scheme-handler/tg;
X-Desktop-File-Install-Version=0.22


That’s it! If ur file has proper content and location u should see new entry immediately in ur app menu. No restart or additional commands needed. Enjoy!

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