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Bootstrap Your Snap

by Alan Pope on 14 February 2019

People frequently tell me they’d like to make a snap of an application they care about. Whether it’s in person at events like FOSDEM, or online via IRC or Telegram, there are developers who want to share their Linux software creations with the world, and snaps are designed exactly for this.

We have run a few in-person “Snapcraft Summits”, bringing together application developers and experts from snapcraft and Linux security to help get software into the Snap Store. Often pair programming through building a snap will accelerate developer knowledge and get applications over the finish line to an audience of millions.

It’s clearly not scalable or sustainable to keep flying programmers and experts around the world to spread wisdom and answer technical questions about software packaging. So last week we kicked off Snapcraft Live to augment our in person summits.

The goal of Snapcraft Live is to bootstrap developers in building snaps and publishing them in the Snap Store. We cover the tools and setup required, best practices and recommended processes. We also have opportunity to ask the experts who sit in the live chat along side the live session.

In the first episode (below) we kicked off with what’s needed to get started, and we built a couple of simple snaps. The live stream is archived, so you can watch (and re-watch) later, and share it with your friends and colleagues.

This week we moved on to a more complex example application, a game written in Rust. This required quite a bit more work as the build process was a little non-standard.

During the stream I was joined in the chat by colleagues from the snapcraft team who were on hand to answer questions from the audience. You may learn additional tips by following along with the chat as you watch the archived version below.

We have plans for specific content in more of these over the coming months. We’re also keen to focus on topics our viewers are keen to understand better.

If there’s something you’d like is to cover in an upcoming Snapcraft Live, drop by the forum and let us know. Alternatively leave a comment on either of the existing videos, and we may incorporate those suggestions in a later session.

Header image by Nils Schirmer on Unsplash

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