On 7-2-20 I gave a talk at the Akron Linux User’s Group on Snapcraft basics.
Here is the repo: https://github.com/shawnmcgraw/get-weather
Here are the notes:
Snapcraft Basics ALUG 7-2-20
Build a snap package from a small Python module, creating a simple command line weather application
Presented by Shawn McGraw
Meta
- What is a snap
- Snapd – runs in the background and manages the snap environment
- Snap packages – install-able package, kinda like a .deb or .rpm but with deps and assets
- Why Snaps? What problem does it solve?
- Tries to solve the problem of developing/packaging/maintaining for different distros and environments such as apt, dnf, yum, packman… even eopkg on Solus
- Runs on any Linux distro (MacOS too)
- Provides app confinement and permissions control
- Bundle assets and dependencies
- Not getting into Snap vs Flatpak… too deep a rabbit hole
The project – What we’re building
- get-weather cli app, written in Python
- Objective was to improve Python coding, learn a bit about a few libraries, setuptools and snaps
Requirements to get started
- snapd
- Python 3
- git
- Openweathermap.org api key
- text editor/IDE
- Clone Github repo:
git clone https://github.com/shawnmcgraw/get-weather
Building the app
- Following the snapcraft docs
- Install snapcraft and multipass:
sudo snap install snapcraft --classic - Look at the cliw.py module
- Create env file and add api_key variable
- snapcraft.yml
- Metadata
- Base
- Parts
- Dependencies
- Commands
- setup.py
- py_modules
- entry_points
- Run
snapcraftcommand - What is Multipass? – Creates a vm in which the snap is built
- Install the snap:
sudo snap install *.snap --devmode - Test the app:
get-weather 44221
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