My company standardized on Cisco Webex Teams for persistent chat. Unfortunately, webex teams does not have a linux client, and recommends that people simply use the web client. Unfortunately, I’m more used to this answer than I’d like, but fortunately I don’t have to any more.
This morning I found a project called Nativefier. It allows you to make any web page a desktop application using electron and a handful of other tools.
Their github page has documentation on how to do the install, but i’ll also add my exact steps. Keep in mind, I’m using Ubuntu 19.04 so YMMV.
You’ll need to have npm installed, and use it to install nativefier.
- sudo apt install npm
- sudo npm install nativefier -g
I manually went to the internet to grab an icon for webex teams that I had the packager use. Feel free to download it and use it, however, from what I read in the documentation, nativefier should have the ability to find the icon automatically. I didn’t try it, but if you do, let me know how it works!
You can use the following snippet to convert convert webex teams into an application.
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nativefier -n "Webex-Teams" -p linux -a x64 -e 4.2.3 -i [absolute-path-to]/cisco-webex-teams.png --tray https://teams.webex.com |
That will create a directory called “webex-teams-linux-x64”. To open webex teams, enter that directory and run the webex-teams binary.
I ran the command below:
$ nativefier -n “Webex-Teams” -p linux -a x64 -e 11.0.3 -i Pictures/cisco-webex-teams.png –tray https://teams.webex.com
Preparing Electron app…
Converting icons…
Packaging… This will take a few seconds, maybe minutes if the requested Electron isn’t cached yet…
Downloading electron-v11.0.3-linux-x64.zip: [====================================================================================================] 100% ETA: 0.0 seconds
Packaging app for platform linux x64 using electron v11.0.3
Finalizing build…
App built to /home/jr/Webex-Teams-linux-x64 , move it wherever it makes sense for you and run the contained executable file (prefixing with ./ if necessary)
Menu/desktop shortcuts are up to you, because Nativefier cannot know where you’re going to move the app. Search for “linux .desktop file” for help, or see https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Desktop_entries
This created a valid directory and everything looks good. My problem is I don’t recognize any executable file as the above instructions?
nativefier –name ‘Webex’ ‘https://web.webex.com’ –internal-urls “.*(okta|cisco|spark|webex)\.(com|net).*” –single-instance
heres my version of it allowing for okta 2fa. hoping it ends up in a search engine and helps someone 🙂