Easiest way to bring Electron Forge app to Snap Store?

snapcraft
1

Hi, I do have a perfectly fine working Electron Forge based app, shipping it for macOS and Windows with no issues, but Linux is problematic.

Basics like shipping the app as a ZIP works, but it’s annoying to use, I’d like to have the app actually installed and something to handle the auto-updates for me (since the update-electron-app doesn’t work on Linux for some reason).

So after checking the Electron Forge docs I picked Snapcraft, since seems to be working on most of the distors, is handling updates, and creates another way the new users might find out about my app - seems like everything I need.

But once I’ve actually tried to publish my app there, I discovered tools for shipping Electron Forge app to Snap Store are basically abandoned, last updates 2-3 years ago, and while I don’t mean using something that is old, but works, this one doesn’t.

  1. Snapcraft v8, released in December 2023 - not supported, because 8 doesn’t supports core18 anymore, which is hardcoded in one of the packages - okay, not a big deal, I’ll just use v7 instead
  2. @electron-forge/publisher-snapcraft is simply broken, this code make no sense, instead of relying on a public API, they import the internals, using it in a not intended way, which end with missing parameters in the parent class and simply throw errors that some stuff is undefined - okay, not a big deal, I’ll just do make with Forge, and then manually call snapcraft push
  3. Snap built with @electron-forge/maker-snap which is a very thin wrapper around electron-installer-snap is not passing the automated validation of the Snap Store, because found errors in file output: unusual mode 'rwsr-xr-x' for entry './project-name/chrome-sandbox' security-snap-v2_squashfs_files - I’m stuck there, no clue what I’m suposed to do, Electron docs states that sanboxing is key to secure app, while edits history of electron-installer-snap shows they disabled sandboxing by default, but yet somehow my app still being rejected…

I did a search through the issues and PRs on GitHub, there are signs someone was fixing something, 3 years ago, but also people that just rage-quited after waiting months for a reply, falling back to using a electron-forge-maker-snap which is also abandoned now.

I’ve also dig though the VS Code app code base, and it looks like they simply handle everything on their own, not using any packages.

Is there a way to handle this problem in a “Electron way”, so without learning platform specific things like mastering the art of crafting snapcraft.yaml files? I’d really prefer to keep my head clean from standard libraries, plugs etc.