Build and package with Snap

[Kevin Zheng]

As suggested by Martin Wimpress: http://snapcraft.io/

[Kevin Zheng]

From Martin email:

I suggest you start by creating a snapcraft.yaml for sshguard git master. See http://snapcraft.io which explains the process of making a snap. Start by using 'devmode' (which is unconfined) to get something working. If you have questions, just ask. Once that is done we can get sshguard automatically building/publishing via Launchpad (which is very simple to set up) and then look at confining sshguard.

Here some more detail for you:

You'll want to take a look at these pages in particular:

• http://snapcraft.io/docs/build-snaps/metadata - See the section "Adding daemons"
• http://snapcraft.io/docs/reference/interfaces - See the 'firewall-control' and 'log-observe' interfaces
• http://snapcraft.io/docs/core/interfaces - See the section "Manually connecting interfaces"
• http://snapcraft.io/docs/reference/env - See the SNAP_COMMON environment variable

I think those sections of the documentation will be important for sshguard and to understand that the 'firewall-control' and 'log-observe' interfaces are not auto-connected, so will require something like the following in the documentation for installing a snap of sshguard:

sudo snap install sshguard
sudo snap connect sshguard:firewall-control core:firewall-control
sudo snap connect sshguard:log-observe core:log-observe

It is possible to have Launchpad automatically mirror your existing git repository of sshguard, automatically build sshguard for multiple architectures and automatically publish those snaps to the snap store.

[劉宗翰]

Hi Kevin,

I've created a snap version of sshguard and published it to the Ubuntu store as well. According to the statistics, there are 177 users from 45 countries/areas using this snap.

Because of the policy issue, I cannot use sshguard as its name. Then, I added my name as suffix. After running more than one year, it seems the snap works well. To make it be available widely, I'm wondering if you want to maintain this snap version? I can transfer the ownership to you. Or, I will apply the snapcrfter process to make it become a community version. After then it will be able to remove the suffix from the name.

[Kevin Zheng]

Thanks for maintaining the unofficial snap for so long. It sounds like users are interested in using the snap.

We didn't end up making the official snap because nobody here knew how to, or didn't have time. I'll take a look at what you have and consider making it official.

[Kevin Zheng]

Sorry for taking so long on this. It’s clear that there’s interest in the Snap package, but I don’t have the experience or Linux systems to test on.

Would you be interested in maintaining the official Snap? What are the steps needed to make a Snap official? What I’ll probably do is clone https://github.com/tsunghanliu/sshguard.snap to the SSHGuard Bitbucket, and then either give you push access or pull from your repository.