First Look at Snaps

I've belatedly come to have a close up look at both Ubuntu Core (Snappy), Snaps and the Snappy package manager.

The first pass was to rebuild my rack of Raspberry Pi's from Debian armhf to Ubuntu Core for the Raspberry Pi.

This proved to be the most graceful install I've ever had on any hardware, ever. No hyperbole: boot, authenticate, done. I repeated this for all six Pi's in such a short time frame that I was concerned I'd done something wrong. Your SSH keys are already installed, you can log in immediately and just get on with it.

Which is where snaps come into play.

Back on my laptop, I followed the tutorial Create Your First Snap which uses GNU Hello as an example snap build and finishes with a push to the snap store at snapcraft.io.

I then created a Launchpad Repo, related a snap package, told it to build for armhf and amd64 and before long, I could install this snap on both my laptop and the Pi's.

Overall this was a pretty impressive and graceful process.