How to switch your snap to use LZO compression

snapcraft
1

Recently we enabled using LZO as a compression format for your snap in order to get better decompression performance for i.e. desktop application snaps. Specifically using LZO compression instead of the default XZ compression will help speedup the time it takes your snap to launch the very first time on a user’s system, at the cost of a slightly larger snap file. You can read more details about this in this blog post.

If you would like to switch to using LZO compression with your snap, all you need to do is to add the compression setting to the snapcraft.yaml like so:

name: test-snapcraft-lzo
base: core18
version: "0.1"
summary: Test LZO snap
description: Test LZO snap
grade: stable
confinement: strict


# this line enables LZO compression for the snap
compression: lzo


parts:
  my-part:
    plugin: nil

apps:
  lzo-things:
    command: bin/something

And then re-build the snap through whatever normal release mechanisms you use to build the snap and release it, and voila :tada: your snap is now using LZO compression.

10 Likes
4

Is there a minimum requirement of the snapd version to support this compression format?

5

@Lin-Buo-Ren (Artificially increasing the length of this post because 20 characters bla bla bla)

6

Thanks for your pointers!