🧁 Muffin

Website: Open Website

Muffin is a lightweight, one-dependency (zero if GUI isn't used) portable application runtime and packaging format for local web applications (.mpa).

Instead of bundling a massive browser engine with every single app like Electron does, Muffin uses your system's existing native Webkit GTK engine. It packages any standard website or web application directory into a single portable ZIP archive (renamed to .mpa), handles automatic system application-menu integration (with custom icons), and respects system-wide dark/light mode configurations.

✨ Features

• 📦 Ultra-Lightweight: Portable apps are just zipped web directories (with an .mpa extension). A basic app can be as small as a few kilobytes.

• 🖥️ Desktop Native Integration: Automatically generates .desktop shortcuts with custom icon.png files, placing your web apps directly in your system's applications menu.

• 🌓 Dynamic System Theming: The Webview frame automatically detects and respects your system-wide dark or light mode preferences (supports GNOME, KDE, etc.).

• 🌐 Muffin Maker (muffin-make): Quickly scrape and package any online web application, or package local HTML/JS projects, into an offline portable desktop app. Now has support for Live Apps, which are apps that run an online website.

• 🗑️ Clean Uninstallation: Built-in delete utility to fully wipe shortcuts, cached files, icons, and library .mpa files.

• 🔌 Auto-Dependency Resolution: The core script automatically detects your active package manager (dnf, apt, pacman, or zypper) and installs the required light-weight system libraries for you.

📥 Installation

Simply clone this repository and run the installer script. It will copy the binaries into your local ~/bin directory and help you set up your system path if needed.

# Install with one command for all systems besides Arch
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AstroMeYT/muffin/refs/heads/main/install-full.sh | sh

Note: If the installer asks to append ~/bin to your system PATH, type y (or Enter) to complete the setup.

🚀 How to Use

1. Build an App (muffin-make)

You can turn any live website or local project folder into an offline desktop application using the muffin-make utility. This utility automatically gathers the files, assigns an icon, packages the .mpa file, and adds it directly to your launcher library.

Option A: Package from a URL

# Usage: muffin-make url <URL> [custom-app-name]
muffin-make url [https://rawg.io](https://rawg.io) rawg-games

Option B: Package from a Local Folder

# Usage: muffin-make folder <path/to/folder> [custom-app-name]
muffin-make folder ~/Projects/calculator my-calculator

Option C: Package a Live App

# Usage: muffin-make live <path/to/folder> <path/to/icon.png> [custom-app-name]
muffin-make folder ~/Projects/calculator ~/Projects/calculator/icon.png my-calculator

2. Run a Muffin Application (muffin)

To run a portable app, you can pass its clean name (if it's in your local library) or point it directly to a downloaded .mpa file path.

# Run an app installed in your local library
muffin run rawg-games

# Run a standalone .mpa file from anywhere
muffin run ~/Downloads/calculator.mpa

3. Uninstall/Delete an Application

To cleanly remove an application from your desktop launcher, delete its icon caches, and wipe it from your library:

muffin delete rawg-games

🛠️ The .mpa File Architecture

A .mpa (Muffin Portable Archive) is literally just a .zip archive renamed to .mpa.

For Muffin to parse and run your custom application correctly, ensure your archive contains at least an index.html at its core:

your-app.mpa (ZIP Archive)
├── index.html       <-- The main application entrypoint (required)
├── favicon.png         <-- Application menu icon (optional, recommended)
├── styles.css       <-- Local stylesheet
├── app.js           <-- Local JavaScript functionality
└── assets/          <-- Local images, fonts, or media assets

your-app.mpa (ZIP Archive) LIVE APP
├── live.txt         <-- The main application entrypoint, containing the website link (required)
└── icon.png         <-- Local image for the app, since the website isn't scraped

If you compress your app's directory directly, Muffin will automatically flatten nested directory structures on extraction to make sure your app still launches flawlessly!

⚖️ Muffin vs. Electron / Tauri

Feature	Muffin 🧁	Electron ⚛️	Tauri 🦀
Average App Size	~10 KB - 5 MB	~120 MB+	~5 MB - 15 MB
Memory Footprint	Minimal (Shared Webkit)	Massive (Dedicated Chromium)	Medium (Dedicated Webview)
Packaging File	.mpa (Simple Zip)	Platform-specific installer	Platform-specific binary
Compilation Required	No (Zero compile-time)	Yes (Long compile-time)	Yes (Requires Rust toolchain)
OS Integration	Automatic .desktop shortcuts	Manual installation process	Manual installation process

🤝 Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Feel free to open issues or submit pull requests to make Muffin even better.

Enjoy your lightweight portable web apps! 🧁

⏰ Future Ideas

• Windows-based MPA executer (it is possible!)