Building a snap package

.YAML Quick start guides Building a snap package

How to build and release a snap package with codemagic.yaml

Setting up snap packaging

To set up snap packaging, create a snapcraft.yaml file with the necessary configurations according to Snapcraft guide for Flutter or follow the general snapcraft.yaml guide.

Optionally, run the snapcraft snap command locally to ensure that everything is set up.

You should store the snapcraft.yaml file in the repository root. Another option is to store snapcraft.yaml in the .snap folder that is located in repository root.

See a sample application along with a codemagic.yaml configuration file that builds and releases a snap package in GitHub.

Building snap packages

Include the snapcraft snap command in the scripts section of your codemagic.yaml file as in the example below. The output of this command is a .snap artifact. It can later be used for publishing to the Snapcraft Snap Store.

workflows:
  snap-build:
    name: Snapcraft Build
    instance_type: linux
    environment:
        SNAPCRAFT_BUILD_ENVIRONMENT: host
    scripts:
      - name: Create a snap
        script: snapcraft snap --output flutter-codemagic-example.snap
    artifacts:
        - '**/*.snap'

Additionally, you may want to install the generated .snap package onto your machine for testing. The package will not be code signed unless you publish it to Snapcraft, so you would need to use the --dangerous flag to install the package without code signing:

snap install your-package.snap --dangerous

In case you are packaging a Flutter application, be sure to set SNAPCRAFT_BUILD_ENVIRONMENT environment variable to host. It is required to avoid virtualization. Read more about virtualization options here. Additionally, Snapcraft manages all the dependencies according to snapcraft.yaml configuration. There is no need to include the Flutter version in codemagic.yaml.

Note: Snap is only available on Linux instances. Make sure to have instance_type: linux or instance_type: linux_x2 in your codemagic.yaml. See the build machine specification here.

Publishing snap packages

Snap packages can be published to the Snapcraft Snap Store.

  1. Generate your Snapcraft credentials file by running the following command locally.
snapcraft export-login snapcraft-login-credentials

You will be asked to enter your Snapcraft account username and password.

  1. The Snapcraft credentials file has to be base64 encoded locally before it can be saved to environment variables and decoded during the build.
  2. Save the environment variable with the name SNAPCRAFT_LOGIN_CREDENTIALS in Codemagic UI (either in Application/Team variables) value and select secure. Add the group for the environment variable to codemagic.yaml.
environment:
      groups:
        - snapcraft_credentials # <-- Include - SNAPCRAFT_LOGIN_CREDENTIALS
  1. In the scripts section, add steps to base64 decode the credentials file, log in to Snapcraft via CLI, build the snap package and release it to the desired channel.
scripts:
  - name: Authenticate
    script: |
      echo $SNAPCRAFT_LOGIN_CREDENTIALS | base64 --decode > /home/builder/snapcraft-login-credentials
      snapcraft login --with /home/builder/snapcraft-login-credentials      
  - name: Create a snap
    script: snapcraft snap --output flutter-codemagic-example.snap
  - name: Upload and release
    script: snapcraft upload flutter-codemagic-example.snap --release stable