Howto build the snap tools?

snapd
1

We are running our own linux distro. It’s based on source only (smitux.com).
We cannot and we do not want to use apt/rpm or something else.

We would like to test the snap tools - but i cannot find any documentation how to build the snap tools.

Any help here?

best regards,
Michael

2

Well most components for snapd are in Go, so you can just build the Go code, the complicated bits are that:

  • snap-exec, snapctl, and snap-update-ns must all be statically linked
  • snap-seccomp might need to be statically linked against libseccomp on your system, we do that for Ubuntu, not sure if that will be needed for your OS
  • snap-confine is C code, that needs to be built manually

You might find the Makefile in the ./cmd directory of snapd useful.

3

Hi Ian,

thanks for your fast answer. My problem was: I could not find the source. I see now it is on GitHub: https://github.com/snapcore/snapd - right ?

HACKIND.md is the official build documentation for Linux distro maintainers (like me)?

You also refer to “libsecomp”: Does this mean that we must install libsecomp in case we want to use snapcraft? fyi: We cannot use any software from NSA - so any SE parts in our Linux kernel are disabled and we cannot change this (no SE-Linux here for good reason).

And one last question: There is a folder “docker” in the snapcraft tree. Does that mean that snapd/snapcraft relies on docker? (I’m sorry but we cannot use docker and we won’t change this).

best regards,
Michael

4

I dont think libseccomp has anything to do with selinux :wink:

https://packages.debian.org/en/sid/libseccomp2

and no, snaps do not use any docker technology or use docker in any way …

5

Hi Ogra,

upps. Sorry - i was misleaded by the libs name (and too lazy to read the libsecomp docs).

So snaps do not use docker? Great news! I think i will give it a try :slight_smile:

best regards, Michael

1 Like
6

If all you are trying to do is use snapcraft, you can build a local package of that without snapd, it will be a less featureful snapcraft, but snapcraft is just python through and through