How to use Snap Packages in Gentoo
One of the main advantages of snap packages is the possibility to use them not only on one Linux distribution like ‘traditional’ packages, but on a wide variety of distributions without having to modify or rebuild them. Many distributions provide the necessary snapd daemon in their repositories.
It is entirely possible to use snap packages with Gentoo too. Even building new snap packages with snapcraft and multipass or LXD will be possible afterwards.
Prerequisites
First and foremost: systemd is a mandatory requirement since snapd is not compatible with OpenRC. Since snapcraft requires elevated privileges, sudo should be installed and properly configured too.
In order to aquire the necessary ressources and permissions on the host system, snapd is using the AppArmor framework. In case you are using your own kernel, it might be necessary to manually enable AppArmor support in its configuration. The relatively new binary packages have AppArmor support already enabled.
I won’t cover the migration of a Gentoo based system to systemd at this point. Since this topic is so extensive, I’ll publish a separate article at a later point in time.
AppArmor and systemd
We need to compile systemd with the USE flags policykit
and apparmor
enabled, libseccomp with static-libs
. Therefore we’ll add the following entries to the /etc/portage/package.use
file:
sys-apps/systemd policykit apparmor sys-libs/libseccomp static-libs
The apparmor ebuild is masked by default, so we unmask it in the /etc/portage/package.accept_keywords
file where we also unmask the snapd ebuild so we always get the latest (non-stable) version.
sys-libs/libapparmor ~amd64 sys-apps/apparmor ~amd64 app-containers/snapd ~amd64
In the next step, we (re-) build systemd and AppArmor.
emerge sys-apps/systemd emerge sys-apps/apparmor
In order to make AppArmor available right after the system is booted up, it’s necessary to modify the bootloader configuration. We need to add the following line to /etc/default/grub
or modify it accordingly:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="apparmor=1 security=apparmor"
Afterwards, the GRUB configuration gets rewritten with the command
grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
and we can reboot the system.
Installing snapd itself
Finally, we install the snapd package and enable the necessary systemd units:
emerge --ask app-containers/snapd systemctl enable --now snapd systemctl enable --now snapd.socket systemctl enable --now snapd.apparmor
The installation of snapd is now complete and snap packages can be used.
Additional permissions for snapcraft
In case we want to allow unprivileged user accounts to create new snaps with snapcraft, we need to add them to the groups adm
or lxd
. The adm
group is necessary if you want to use multipass for providing the build VM, lxd
if you want to use LXD instead.
gpasswd --add username adm gpasswd --add username lxd
Thanks a bunch 🙂
I think you have a typo here: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINIX_DEFAULT
Thank you, I fixed it 🙂