April Snapcraft Docs Day

Continuing Snapcraft Docs Days

In March we had our first Snapcraft Docs Day on the last Friday of the month. It was fun and successful so we’re doing it again this Friday, 28th April 2017. Join us in #snapcraft on Rocket Chat and on the snapcraft forums

Flavour of the month

This month’s theme is ‘Flavours’, specifically Ubuntu Flavours. We’ve worked hard to make the experience of using snapcraft to build snaps as easy as possible. Part of that work was to ensure it works as expected on all supported Ubuntu flavours. Many of us run stock Ubuntu and despite our best efforts, may not have caught certain edge cases only apparent on flavours.

If you’re running an Ubuntu flavour, then we’d love to hear how we did. Do the tutorials we’ve written work as expected? Is the documentation clear, unambiguous and accurate? Can you successfully create a brand new snap and publish it to the store using snapcraft on your flavour of choice?

Soup of the day

On Friday we’d love to hear about your experiences on an Ubuntu flavour of doing things like:-

• Ensuring snapd is installed via these instructions
• Installing snapcraft via snap install snapcraft --edge --classic
• Follow the Snapcraft Tour
• Go through the first Snapcraft Tutorial
• Snap a project of your own, by following our build snaps docs
• Find other projects to snap (see below)

Happy Hour

On the subject of snapping other people’s projects. Here’s some tips we think you may find useful.

• Look for new / interesting open source projects on github trending projects such as trending python projects or trending go projects, or perhaps recent show HN submissions.
• Ask in #snapcraft on Rocket Chat if others have already started on a snap, to avoid duplication & collaborate.
• Avoid snapping frameworks, libraries, but focus more atomic tools, utilities and full applications
• Start small. Perhaps choose command line or server-based applications, as they’re often easier for the beginner than full fat graphical desktop applications.
• Pick applications written in languages you’re familiar with. Although not compulsory, it can help when debugging
• Contribute upstream. Once you have a prototype or fully working snap, contribute the yaml to the upstream project, so they can incorporate it in their release process
• Consider uploading the application to the store for wider testing, but be prepared to hand the application over to the upstream developer if they request it

Finally, if you’re looking for inspiration, join us in #snapcraft on Rocket Chat and ask! We’ve all got our own pet projects we’d like to see snapped.

Food for thought

Repeated from last time, here’s a handy reference of the projects we work on with their repos and bug trackers:-