How to start a snap package

Question

I have read some tutorials about Snapcraft and snappy and I am really excited about it.

I am using 16.04 and used snap find to find and install the ubuntu-calculator-app snap. But I don't know how to start it.

It is neither in my Dash (Unity 7) nor in my path (using zsh)

Also, I followed the instructions in this blog post

To create a links snap and install it. But, again, I don't know how to start the app.

Solution 1

Just log out and log back in. If you are upgrading from an earlier version of 16.04 development release you will not have /snap/bin in your PATH environment variable.

Solution 2

Snaps can be run with snap run, so for the example in the question snap run ubuntu-calculator-app. But that is annoying so it is better to add snaps to your path. If the app is a gui, once you open it you can right-click on the launcher icon and select add to dash.

Snaps are not in your path by default on 16.04. They are stored in /snap/bin. Since snaps are a system-wide installation it would probably be best to add this directory to your system-wide path. This is done via the file /etc/environment. The following can break stuff, so you should backup the file before editing it sudo cp /etc/environment /etc/environment.bak. Use an editor with sudo to open /etc/environment, and add :/snap/bin to the end of the PATH entry. Make sure you restart your terminal or source /etc/environment

If that still doesn't work, you need to make sure your user .bashrc file has added /etc/environment to its sources. grep "source /etc/environment" ~/.bashrc will echo that line if it exists. If it doesn't echo "source /etc/environment" >> ~/.bashrc will add it.

Solution 3

Just including the path to the /snap/bin in the local ~/.bashrc works for me.

Run the following

• echo "export PATH=$PATH:/snap/bin" >> ~/.bashrc
• source ~/.bashrc

Solution 4

Essentially, as Zygmunt was saying. For completeness, the other alternative is to run the app from the command line:

ubuntu-calculator-app.calculator

Check out the documentation on how to get started with snaps on classic Ubuntu.

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Comments

[Alejandro Vera]

Great. If you can point me where in the documentation is that path it would be great.

[noobninja]

append PATH=$PATH:/snap/bin to end of ~/.bashrc file.

[Marnix A. van Ammers]

Logging out and in didn't do it for me. I had to manually add /snap/bin to my PATH in my .bashrc file.

[Franklin Yu]

@MarnixA.vanAmmers You should modify $PATH in .profile or .bash_profile, not in .bashrc; see How to correctly add a path to PATH?.