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Blog posts tagged
"snapcraft"


Igor Ljubuncic
18 September 2020

The Expandables – snapcraft extensions and the secret code

Desktop Article

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 ...


Alan Pope
10 September 2020

Snap! Collaborate and listen!

Desktop Article

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 ...


Igor Ljubuncic
27 August 2020

Snapcraft corner: Staying on track

Desktop Article

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 ...


Kyle Fazzari
17 August 2020

How to build a snap using ROS 2 Foxy

Robotics Article

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 ...


Alan Pope
25 June 2020

Split Personality Snaps

Internet of Things Article

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 ...


Igor Ljubuncic
5 June 2020

Fabrica – Your self-hosted snap factory

Cloud and server Article

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 ...


Igor Ljubuncic
29 May 2020

Snapcraft development tips: how to troubleshoot snaps with services

Cloud and server Article

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 ...


Igor Ljubuncic
20 May 2020

Experimental feature: progressive releases

Cloud and server Article

“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 ...


Luke Wesley-Holley
26 April 2020

We are changing the way you build snaps from GitHub repos

Desktop Article

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 ...


Heather Ellsworth
17 April 2020

GNOME 3.34 snapcraft extension

Desktop Article

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 ...


Igor Ljubuncic
27 March 2020

Learn snapcraft by example – multi-app client-server snap

DevOps Article

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 ...


Igor Ljubuncic
19 March 2020

Snapcraft tricks: Improve release flexibility with pull and build overrides

Desktop Article

Sometimes, software projects are simple – one architecture, one version, one release. But often, they can be complex, targeting multiple platforms, and with different versions at that. If you are packaging your apps as snaps, you might wonder about the optimal way to accommodate a multi-dimensional release matrix. One yaml to rule them al ...