If you haven’t heard, snaps are a new, modern packaging format made by the guys at Ubuntu. Snaps give every app a confined environment to live in, making desktops more secure and dependencies less of a hassle. One common way to create a snap is to simply use existing packages from the Ubuntu archives.

Let’s try to create a snap for the game pingus. pingus is a great little Lemmings clone that we can easily convert to a snap. We’ll start by installing the necessary dependencies for snap building (see the snapcraft website for more):

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$ sudo apt install snapcraft

Now we can initialize a project directory with snapcraft:

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$ mkdir -p pingus-snap && cd pingus-snap
$ snapcraft init

snapcraft init creates the following sample file to give us an idea of what we’ll need to provide.

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name: my-snap-name # you probably want to 'snapcraft register <name>'
version: '0.1' # just for humans, typically '1.2+git' or '1.3.2'
summary: Single-line elevator pitch for your amazing snap # 79 char long summary
description: |
  This is my-snap's description. You have a paragraph or two to tell the
  most important story about your snap. Keep it under 100 words though,
  we live in tweetspace and your description wants to look good in the snap
  store.

grade: devel # must be 'stable' to release into candidate/stable channels
confinement: devmode # use 'strict' once you have the right plugs and slots

parts:
  my-part:
    # See 'snapcraft plugins'
    plugin: nil

Most of these values for our pingus snap should be obvious. The interesting markup here is in parts, which is where we’ll describe how to build our snap. We’ll start by taking advantage of the nil plugin to simply unpack the pingus deb from the archive. We define our list of debs to install in a list called stage-packages. We’ll also define another section, apps, to tell snapcraft what binaries we want to be able to execute. In our case, this will just be the pingus command. Here’s what my first draft looks like:

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name: pingus
version: '0.1'
summary: Free Lemmings(TM) clone
description: |
    Pingus is a free clone of the popular Lemmings game.
    |
    Your goal is to guide a horde of penguins through a world full of obstacles
    and penguin traps to safety. Although penguins (unlike lemmings) are rather
    smart, they sometimes lack the necessary overview and now rely on you to
    save them.

grade: devel
confinement: devmode

parts:
  archives:
    plugin: nil
    stage-packages:
      - pingus

apps:
  pingus:
    command: usr/games/pingus

Nice, right? Building and installing our snap is easy:

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$ snapcraft
$ sudo snap install --devmode pingus_0.1_amd64.snap
pingus 0.1 installed

We used devmode here because our app will be running unconfined (a topic for another blog post). Now, for the moment of truth! The snap tools automatically put our new app in PATH, so we can just run pingus:

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$ pingus
/snap/pingus/x2/usr/games/pingus: 2: exec: /usr/lib/games/pingus/pingus: not found

¡Ay, caramba! We’ve run into a fairly common issue while snapping legacy software: hardcoded paths. Fortunately, the corresponding pingus executable is very simple. It’s trying to execute a command living in /usr/lib/games/pingus, which is not in our snap’s PATH. The easiest way to fix this is to fix the pingus executable. Since we don’t want to spend time modifying the upstream to use a relative path, we can create our own version of the pingus wrapper locally and copy it into our snap. The only change to this new wrapper will be prepending the snap’s install path $SNAP to the absolute paths:

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#!/bin/sh
exec $SNAP/usr/lib/games/pingus/pingus --datadir $SNAP/usr/share/games/pingus/data $@

Now we can update our yaml file with a new part called env which will use the dump plugin to copy our wrapper file into the snap. We’ll also update our command to call the wrapper:

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# ...

parts:
  archives:
    plugin: nil
    stage-packages:
      - pingus
  env:
    plugin: dump
    organize:
      pingus.wrapper: usr/bin/pingus

apps:
  pingus:
    command: pingus

When you run snapcraft this time, the env part will be built. After performing another install, you can run pingus, and you should be greeted with one of the best Lemmings clones available! Because we’re running unconfined in devmode, this all just works without any issues. I intend to write another blog post in the near future with the details on confining pingus, so look out for that soon. I may also go into detail on building more complex cases, such as building snaps from source and building custom plugins, or reviewing a case study such as the libertine snap.

For much, much more on snaps, be sure to visit snapcraft.io. If you’re looking for a published version of pingus as a snap, you can try sudo snap install --devmode --beta pingus-game, and you can run the game with pingus-game.pingus.

Source code available at https://github.com/larryprice/pingus-snap.