Hi there! A somewhat common request that the Starcraft team gets is to deploy Snapcraft through a container image, in addition to the official snap. This makes sense in the context of environments that already make heavy use of containers in general, and some time ago we developed a Dockerfile but it’s now outdated and we can’t reasonably update it without breaking clients.
Our new initiative is called Snapcraft rocks, which are OCI-compliant container images currently published on Github’s container registry. These images are still in development but they are actively maintained and updated in lockstep with Snapcraft itself.
If you wish to use Snapcraft through a container, this is a call-for-testing of sorts: please take the images out for a spin (there are instructions on the repo and image pages), and report any issues you bump into. Thanks!
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Although not for me personally; this is absolutely huge for a lot of people I know where they can e.g run OCI images for CI but often being Docker images, usually without systemd and hence snapd and by extension snapcraft.
I’m probably not the target audience for this myself right now but I know plenty of people would be interested in these if they’re kept up to date since it sorts out a lot of technical problems that often come from business policy choices or just generally established environments that aren’t easily changed.
So super cool, thanks!
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Thanks for the kind words! Yes that environment is the target use case exactly.
We’ve automated the updating, building and testing of these images because we do commit to keep them up-to-date with “mainline” Snapcraft. So far all minor updates to Snapcraft 7.x and 8.x have been applied with no issues - here’s an example from when Snapcraft 8.0.5 dropped a couple of weeks ago: https://github.com/canonical/snapcraft-rocks/pull/27
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