Blog posts tagged "snapcraft"

Snaps are designed to be self-contained packages of binaries, libraries and other assets. A snap might end up being quite bulky if the primary application it contains has many additional dependencies. This is a by-product of the snap needing to run on any Linux distribution where dependencies cannot always be expected to be installed. Thi

Everyone wants fast applications. Recently, we provided a mechanism to make snap applications launch faster by using the LZO format. We introduced this change because users reported desktop snaps starting more slowly than the same applications distributed via traditional, native Linux packaging formats like Deb or RPM. After a thorough in

I’m celebrating nine years at Canonical, and coming up on 15 years since I started contributing to Ubuntu in the community. It’s been quite the ride, helping build, support and advocate for the most popular Linux desktop, and most used Linux distribution in the cloud. Over those years, we’ve strived to make it easy for

In October, we shared a blog post detailing significant snap startup time improvements due to the use of a new compression algorithm. In that article, we focused on the cold and hot application startups, but we did not delve much into the first-run setup scenario. While running our tests, we observed a rather interesting phenomenon,

The Snap Store has been designed to enable upstream developers and enthusiastic community contributors to publish snaps. As with most Linux packaging solutions, the wider community are often responsible for starting and maintaining software packages. This is a double-edged sword, especially for humans with limited life spans and other shi

If you’re a snap developer, you know that snap development is terribly easy. Or rather complex and difficult. Depending on your application code and requirements, it can take a lot of effort putting together the snapcraft.yaml file from which you will build your snap. One of our goals is to make snap development practically easier

You’d think we would be running out of terrible/great (delete as applicable) 80s songs to try and shoehorn into the titles of these blog posts. Turns out, not quite yet! “How can I help?” is a phrase often used in Open Source projects by enthusiastic users and developers. There are a lot of moving parts

Snapcraft channels and, consequently, tracks are an important, highly useful element of the snap ecosystem. Tracks enable snap developers to publish multiple supported releases of their application under the same snap name. All snaps must have a default track – called latest, but there can be many others, giving both developers flexibilit

The snapcraft CLI (the tool used to create snaps) has long had support for building snaps that use both ROS 1 and ROS 2. ROS 2 Foxy Fitzroy is the latest ROS 2 LTS, which runs on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). The snapcraft CLI recently gained experimental support for building Foxy snaps, so I wanted

Broadly speaking, most snaps in the Snap Store fall into one of two categories, desktop applications and server daemons. The graphical applications such as Chromium and Spotify use desktop files, which ensure they can be opened on demand by any user via a menu or launcher. The server applications such as NextCloud and AdGuard-Home typical

There are many ways one can go about building snaps. You can do it on your local system, by manually running commands in a terminal window. If you have a developer account in the Snap Store, you can use the integrated build functionality to create snaps. You can also use Launchpad, Electron Builder or a

In the past, we have discussed various ways on how to debug and troubleshoot potential issues during snap development. The ability to quickly iterate, resolve build process hurdles and publish the application in a timely manner is essential to a robust, positive development experience. Today, we would like to outline a few basic tips and

“No plan survives contact with the enemy.” This is a quote famously attributed to the Prussian field marshal Helmuth von Moltke. It is also quite applicable to software development: “No code survives contact with the user.” In mission-critical environments, staggered deployments of software are a crucial part of controlled updates, design

On 11 March 2020 we introduced a new process for building a snap using GitHub repos to snapcraft.io. Here is all you need to know about this update. What is build.snapcraft.io? Build.snapcraft.io allows you to automatically build and release snaps from a GitHub repository. This means you can build your snaps for multiple architectures and

We constantly strive to empower developers. Part of that aim extends to making development easier, for example improving build tools and documentation. As an element of this continued effort, we would like to introduce the new gnome-3-34 snapcraft extension! What is the GNOME snapcraft extension? The gnome-3-34 snapcraft extension is a co

Over the past few months, we published a number of articles showing how to snap desktop applications written in different languages – Rust, Java, C/C++, and others. In each one of these zero-to-hero guides, we went through a representative snapcraft.yaml file and highlighted the specific bits and pieces developers need to successfully bui