Today, June 9, 2016, Canonical has pushed a new major milestone of the Snapcraft tool for the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system, version 2.10, which users can use to package their apps as Snaps.
Snapcraft 2.10 appears to be a major release, though we can't help but notice that the latest version uploaded a few hours ago to the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS stable repositories is version 2.10.1. The biggest new features of Snapcraft 2.10 are support for macaroons for authentication for a better developer experience.
The macaroons support for authentication will allow the Snapcraft devs to create additional features for communicating with the store APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). Moreover, it looks like there's now support for zip files, which will be used as a source type for plugins.
Also new in Snapcraft 2.10 is the ability for the "snapcraft init" command to generate a valid template that newcomers can use to start packaging their apps as Snaps. More work has been done for the parts ecosystem, which received initial backend support, and snapd will now make sure Snaps have all they need to work properly on your OS.
"Many more ongoing tasks and bugs have been fixed, mostly polish related to outputs and error messages; by the way, bugs are always welcome when an error message does not make sense. There have been tiny but nice improvements to the go and node.js plugins as well," reads the announcement.
Here's how to install or update to Snapcraft 2.10 in Ubuntu
As mentioned before, Snapcraft 2.10.1 is the version available right now in the stable software repositories of the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system, and you can install it as we speak using the following instructions.
First, open the Terminal app, then copy/paste the commands listed below, one by one, hitting the Enter key after each one, and waiting for the previous command to finish before executing the next.
sudo apt update
sudo apt install snapcraft If you also plan on installing the corresponding example package for Snapcraft 2.10, please consider using the following command in the Terminal app. Then, you can start using Snapcraft from the command-line by typing the second command below.
sudo apt install snapcraft-examples
snapcraft --help 