Asana for Linux (unofficial)

Asana ships an Electron desktop app for macOS and Windows but not Linux. Their app has no native modules and no app.asar.unpacked — it's pure JS (they even carry @electron-forge/maker-deb and maker-rpm in their devDependencies; they just never ship the result). So the official macOS app.asar runs unmodified on a Linux Electron of the same major version.

This flake does the whole repack at build time. The official Asana.dmg is a locked flake input (the URL always points at the latest release; flake.lock pins the exact file), and the build extracts the asar out of it, applies two data-level patches, and repacks:

1. Icon files. On non-macOS the app resolves icon paths to .ico files (assets/asana_prod.ico, assets/asanaTrayTemplate.ico — the latter was never shipped at all), and Linux Electron's nativeImage can't decode real ICO. It sniffs content rather than extension, so PNG bytes (pulled from asana_prod.icns) at the .ico-named paths work fine.
2. User agent. The app identifies as AsanaDesktopOfficial ${process.platform}_${arch}/<version>, and app.asana.com rejects the login token exchange (/-/desktop_start_session → ?error=failed_start_session, shown as "something went wrong") when the platform isn't one it knows. One string in the UA template is changed so it reports darwin_<arch> instead of linux_<arch>.

No JavaScript logic is modified.

Run / install

nix run .                      # one-off
nix profile install .          # install; desktop entry + icon included

Login flow / asanadesktop:// scheme

The desktop login flow hands the session from your browser back to the app via asanadesktop:// URLs. The desktop entry advertises MimeType=x-scheme-handler/asanadesktop, and the app forwards URLs from second launches to the running instance via its single-instance lock — but the scheme's default handler registration is per-user state. After installing, run once:

xdg-mime default asana.desktop x-scheme-handler/asanadesktop

(The wrapper also sets CHROME_DESKTOP=asana.desktop, so the app's own setAsDefaultProtocolClient("asanadesktop") call — which shells out to xdg-settings on Linux — can register the right desktop file by itself, but the explicit xdg-mime line doesn't depend on xdg-settings working under your compositor.)

Updating

nix flake update asana-dmg
nix build .

Then bump version in flake.nix to whatever the build tells you it found — the build fails on a mismatch so the flake can't silently drift, and it also fails if Asana's Electron major no longer matches nixpkgs' electron (pin a matching electron_NN in the flake if that happens).

Notes

• Because it runs under a bare electron binary, app.isPackaged is false and the app considers itself a dev build: profile lives in ~/.config/Asana Dev/, release channel reports "beta", the Debug menu is enabled, and the auto-updater never initializes (it's gated on dev mode before any platform check). Updates happen via nix flake update instead; nothing self-updates.
• The server can still age old clients out: app.asana.com has a "DesktopForceUpdatePage" flow that walls clients it considers too old, which on Linux can't self-resolve. If that ever appears, update the flake input.
• Asana version at time of writing: 2.7.2 (Electron 41.1.0; nixpkgs Electron 41.9.1).