Canonical Releases Snapcraft 2.10 Snaps Creator with Support for ZIP Files, More

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 employ 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 2.10.1. The biggest new feature of Snapcraft 2.10 is macaroons support for authentication and is meant 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 effort has been put into the parts ecosystem, which has 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.