concept snap in category linux

This is an excerpt from Manning's book Linux in Action. Login to get full access to this book.

I have the solution to at least one of those problems: Ubuntu’s snaps. I should mention that none of the projects in this book rely on snaps, so if the topic doesn’t interest you, there’s nothing preventing you from skipping this section and joining up with us once again at section 8.3 in a couple of pages. No hard feelings.

Now where was I? Oh, yes. Snaps are software packages that are, by design, entirely self-contained. All you need is a Linux distro that’s snap-compliant and the name of a package. (As of this writing, most distros including CentOS and OpenSUSE are either already there or getting close.) If you run this command from a Linux terminal

The snap system is more than a package manager. As you can see in figure 8.1, snaps are themselves isolated sandboxes with limited access to other system resources.

Figure 8.1. Snap architecture: notice how exchanging data between snaps and system resources is carefully controlled to maintain security isolation.

Application developers have already built hundreds of snaps, which are managed through a number of sources including the Ubuntu Store (https://snapcraft.io). You can search for available snaps from the command line using snap find and a keyword describing what you’re looking for. Here are some of the results from a search of snaps containing the keyword server:

$ snap find server
Name                       Version  Developer    Summary
minecraft-server-jdstrand  16.04.10 jdstrand     Minecraft server packaging
                         for Ubuntu Core
thinger-maker-server       1.3.0    thinger      Thinger.io Internet Of
                         Things Server
rocketchat-server          0.57.2   rocketchat   Group chat server for 100s,
                         installed in seconds.
tika-server                1.16     magicaltrout Tika Server for metadata
                         discovery and extraction
kurento-media-server       6.6.1    surjohn      kurento-media-server on
                         snappy
nats-server                0.9.4    nats-io      High-Performance server
                         for NATS
kms-serverproxy-demo       6.6.0    surjohn      kurento service server
                         side proxy demo
lxd-demo-server            git      stgraber     Online software demo
                         sessions using LXD
[...]

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It turns out that Nextcloud was among the first major application projects to add its package as a snap. Running snap install nextcloud on a brand-new, clean Ubuntu 17.04 VirtualBox VM will give you a fully functioning Nextcloud server without having to manually install all the LAMP elements first: