snap - how to grant permanent permission to read folder

Question

I have installed chromium snap package. Each time I download file and try to open it or download folder I see a GNOME prompt form with question:

Allow opening file?
Allow snap "chromium" to open file "/home/username/Download"?

How can I disable it permanently? Is there an option to grant read/open permission to this folder for particular snap package?

• OS: Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
• X: GNOME
• snapd version: 2.33

Solution 1

This is the intentional behavior of snapd and hard-coded into source code.

This feature, opening files in snapd, is new (about seven month old). As I understand the developers are conservative and prompt is to prevent any security issues. The discussion about subject in forum.snapcraft.io and pull request that introduced new feature.

Solution 2

I got this solved in two steps:

1. remove chromium-browser from snap: snap remove chromium-browser (snap list to check if the browser is in the snap list)
2. install the browser traditionally: sudo apt install chromium-browser

Comments

[Ads20000]

Output of snap interfaces chromium? :) Also for the version it's best to include the tracking, refresh-date, and installed lines of snap info chromium and snap info core as well as snap version.

[Kvothe]

@Ads20000, Hi I have the same problem. Since you ask for these additional details are you saying this is not default behavior? (Or do you need to know the version etc to grant the permission?) Are you saying that depending on the info you asked for you might have a solution? (In which case I will gladly supply my outputs).

[pomsky]

Related: Popup when opening files in Telegram Desktop

[whyer]

neither sudo snap connect chromium:home nor sudo snap connect chromium:removable-media didn't help on ubuntu 19.04

[pomsky]

Not actually a solution as the question specifically asks how to grant a permanent read permission to the snap version of Chromium. It seems OP is knowingly using the snap application. Nevertheless it would be a workaround for users who installed the snap version without knowing the differences.

[Kulfy]

Apart from what pomsky said, since Ubuntu is moving towards more snap, no matter if you use APT to install Chromium on newer versions such as 19.10, you'll still get a snap package.

[chovy]

I don't have snap chromium installed.

[Dan Dascalescu]

Yep, used apt to install Chromium on Ubuntu 20, got the snap package 😠