Installing snap on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)

Snap is available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9.x, RHEL 8 and RHEL 7, from the 7.6 release onwards. It’s also available for CentOS 7.6+ (see Installing snap on CentOS).

The packages for RHEL are in the distribution’s respective Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) repository. The instructions for adding this repository diverge slightly between RHEL9, RHEL 8 and RHEL 7, which is why they’re listed separately below.

:information_source: If you need to know which version of Red Hat you’re running, type cat /etc/redhat-release.

If you don’t already have the EPEL repository added to your distribution, it can be added as follows:

Adding EPEL to RHEL 9

The EPEL repository can be added to a RHEL 9 system with the following command:

sudo dnf install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-9.noarch.rpm
sudo dnf upgrade

:information_source: If you’re interested in understanding how these packages are built, see Building a snap RPM for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.

Adding EPEL to RHEL 8

The EPEL repository can be added to a RHEL 8 system with the following command:

sudo dnf install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-8.noarch.rpm
sudo dnf upgrade

:information_source: If you’re interested in understanding how these packages are built, see Building a snap RPM for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.

Adding EPEL to RHEL 7

The EPEL repository can be added to a RHEL 7 system with the following command:

sudo rpm -ivh https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm

Adding the optional and extras repositories is also recommended:

sudo subscription-manager repos --enable "rhel-*-optional-rpms" --enable "rhel-*-extras-rpms"
sudo yum update

Installing snapd

With the EPEL repository added to your RHEL installation, the next step is to install the snapd package:

sudo yum install snapd

Once installed, the systemd unit that manages the main snap communication socket needs to be enabled:

sudo systemctl enable --now snapd.socket

To enable classic snap support, enter the following to create a symbolic link between /var/lib/snapd/snap and /snap:

sudo ln -s /var/lib/snapd/snap /snap

Either log out and back in again or restart your system to ensure snap’s paths are updated correctly.

Snap is now installed and ready to go! If you’re using a desktop, a great next step is to install the Snap Store app.

Last updated 10 months ago.

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