Snap crafting
Snapcraft is the developer tool available for creating, building, releasing and updating snaps on any Linux workstation. Comprehensive training workshops are offered for engineering teams to quickly become comfortable with creating and publishing snaps.
Snaps are built in 3 simple steps:
-
Model
Identify the software modules, libraries and dependencies that make up your application in a yaml file. -
Build
Use the Snapcraft build tool to package your application in a snap in a virtual machine on your host computer. -
Publish
Publish your snap to the public (snap store) or private repository for snaps (IoT app store). See the next section for more information about publishing snaps.
Maintaining snaps
Snapcraft integrates with CI/CD tools to build and release apps automatically upon software commits. Snaps use the concept of channels for software versioning. Channels define which release of a snap is installed and tracked for updates.
Channels consist of tracks, risk-levels and branches. When released, snaps are published to a track in the public or private repository they are hosted in. There are fours risk-levels in each track, each reflects a level of software maturity:
- stable: production-ready
- candidate: for testing purposes prior to production deployment
- beta: for testing of the latest development features
- edge: closely tracks development, often auto built and released
Branches are optional and hold temporary releases intended to help with bug-fixing. Channels provide a consistent method of software versioning, standardising software delivery for developers and users.