How do I compile a snap for armhf/arm64?

[Zane470]

I’m trying to compile an Electron app using electron-builder. My problem is that there doesn’t seem to be any clear way to build a snap for any of the arm varieties at the moment.

I can’t cross compile for armhf or arm64 from my amd64 machine, as cross compilation isn’t working with the current snapcraft+multipass versions. The snap builds fine if I’m targeting my amd64 machine, but throws errors otherwise.

I then decided to try to build an arm64 snap on my raspberry pi with an Ubuntu Server arm64 installation. That didn’t work either because qemu doesn’t launch on the raspi2 kernel (virtualization is disabled I think). Same with the standard armhf version…

Long story short, I’m not understanding how one actually goes about generating an armhf or arm64 snap at the moment.

More of my struggles can be seen here:

Issue: build snap for armhf on amd64

[ogra]

you could try to create an lxd container for armhf or arm64 on your machine, then inside the container you can export

SNAPCRAFT_BUILD_ENVIRONMENT=host

to make snapcraft not use multipass inside the container …

The SNAPCRAFT_BUILD_ENVIRONMENT environment variable

Synopsis Handle the chosen build provider. Description To determine the build environment, SNAPCRAFT_BUILD_ENVIRONMENT is retrieved from the environment and used to determine the build provider. An environment can be forced by use of force_provider during initialization. The default environment is multipass unless the snapcraft is run inside docker for which the preferred environment will be to use the host. Valid values are: host: the host will drive the build. managed-host: the host will d…

[Zane470]

Thanks! This ended up working. I didn’t bother using LXD and just set that environment variable and it built my electron app locally on the Pi without using multipass.