Snapcraft 3.4
19 April 2019

I am really excited about this release as it brings two features I have personally been missing:

  • the option to --use-lxd
  • the possibility to snapcraft try

If you are already on the stable channel for snapcraft then all you need to do is wait for the snap to be refreshed.

The full release notes are replicated here below

snapcraft snap

The snapcraft snap has now moved to using base: core, this unlocks snapcraft into using the snapcraft 3.0 features in its own snapcraft.yaml in order to build snapcraft from snapcraft (lots of snapcraft in that sentence!)

Core

New build provider support: LXD

You can now use LXD as a build provider, operations supported by the default mode (using multipass) are also supported with LXD, such as:

  • --shell
  • --shell-after
  • --debug

To trigger use of LXD, the snapcraft lifecycle commands (pull, build, stage and prime, together with clean) need use the --use-lxd option.

This feature is introduced early to get feedback, but is not production ready unless it is a discardable CI environment. Early adopters may see future (with no automatic migration) changes to:

  • storage setups
  • default profiles
  • use of LXD projects

snapcraft try

By default, when triggering builds in a clean environment, it is sometimes desirable to have the prime directory locally to be able to snap try prime. For this reason snapcraft try will run through the lifecycle all the way to prime(if not run before) and offer the prime directory locally.

While this version of snapcraft is not on stable, when combined with --use-lxd, one must pass SNAPCRAFT_BUILD_ENVIRONMENT_CHANNEL_SNAPCRAFT=latest/candidate to snapcraft. Support for snap injection for LXD will be worked on when snapd 2.38 is released.

Plugins

go

The go plugin now works more broadly when using classic confinement. This should avoid the necessity of specifying no-patchelf for parts failing to patch correctly.

catkin

The catkin plugin has been enhanced to support stage-snaps to satisfy dependencies, a detailed write up can be found on the snapcraft blog.

The issues and features worked on for 3.4 can be seen on the 3.4 launchpad milestone which are reflected in the following change list:

Sergio Schvezov

  • build providers: modify the _run signature (#2511) (LP: #1821401)
  • build providers: support for provider setup (#2515) (LP: #1821586)
  • readme: add snap store badge (#2516)
  • build providers: initial support for LXD (#2509) (LP: #1805221)
  • cli: cleanup environment detection (#2521)
  • build providers: add API for friendly instance type names (#2522)
  • snap: set core as a base (#2520)
  • ci: improve travis integration conditionals (#2523)
  • cli: snapcraft try (#2524) (LP: #1805212)
  • build providers: idempotent destroy for LXD (#2529)
  • tests: add missing pylxd Build-Depends
  • tests: restrict catking stage-snap tests arches

Claudio Matsuoka

  • repo: handle deb package fetch error (#2513)
  • project: ensure yaml load returns a dictionary (#2517)
  • many: better handling of appstream icons (#2512) (LP: #1814898)
  • go plugin, elf: use patchelf 0.10 and relink dynamic go binaries (#2519) (LP: #1805205)
  • snap: use snapcraft’s 0.10 patchelf branch (#2528)
  • snap: revert to patchelf 0.9 with local patches (#2531)

adanhawth

  • schema: add more detail wrt numeric version errors (#2506)

Kyle Fazzari

  • catkin plugin: check stage-snaps for ROS dependencies (#2525)