How to expose $SNAP_COMMON/usr/share/[game]/ as /usr/share/[game]/

snapcraft
1

Hi
I’m snapping a game engine that relies on some external proprietary data. I was wondering how to expose $SNAP_COMMON/usr/share/[game]/ as /usr/share/[game]/
to my application? snap doesn’t seem to do this by default when I copy the files manually.

2

You cannot make your application “imagine” that the files are in the normal location yet. That is coming in a future update to snapd, and is being worked on now. You might find that the game engine supports an override via either an environment variable or a command-line flag. If it supports that then you can do one of the following, depending on which it supports:

environment

apps:
  my-game-engine:
    ...
    environment:
      OVERRIDE_FILE_VARIABLE_NAME: $SNAP/usr/share/my-game

command-line

apps:
  my-game-engine:
    ...
    command: path/to/executable --override-files-flag=$SNAP/usr/share/my-game
1 Like
3

It’s been a while since I looked at this topic. and it seems that snap has made some improvements since. Am I correct in thinking that the new mapping functionality will solve my issue?

4

You can now make your snap see the game files in the correct location with the snapd feature we’re calling “layouts”:

...

base: core # this is needed to enable the new functionality
# `core` is the original 16-series based on Ubuntu 16.04 and core18 is the 18-series based on Ubuntu 18.04

layout:
  /usr/share/<insert your folder name>:
    bind: $SNAP/usr/share/<insert your folder name>

parts:
  ...

apps:
  ...
1 Like