Desktop Snap Releases#

Snap is a package format supported by Canonical. It’s targeted to support every Linux distribution but it’s mainly available on Ubuntu at the moment. We’ve made Firefox publicly available on https://snapcraft.io/firefox since Firefox 59.0.

Channels used#

The snap store comes with the concept of tracks (à la Google Play Store). For more explanation about them, see https://docs.snapcraft.io/reference/channels. Release promotion automatically uploads to these tracks:

Brand name

Track

Notes

Firefox

candidate

A human has to manually promote the Snap to the stable channel

Firefox Beta

beta

Firefox Developer Edition

N/A

Not supported yet

Firefox Nightly

N/A

Not supported yet

Firefox ESR

esr aka esr/stable

We plan to use esr /candidate whenever the next major ESR version comes out

Promote a snap to the stable channel#

Who?#

Like for Google Play, Release Management is in change of deciding when they want to fully ship a Snap. Release Management has access to the web interface (and the CLI because credentials are the same) and performs the release action (like Google Play). If needed, Release Engineering can help.

When?#

Because, there is no roll out mechanism, Snaps are shipped to the entire population of a given channel. Unlike Google Play, we can roll back users to previous version, if needed. However, downgrades aren’t supported internally in Firefox. Based on these facts, we should ship when we have enough data of the stability on Linux.

How?#

The easy way: via web interface#

  1. Connect to https://dashboard.snapcraft.io/snaps/firefox/. Your credentials will be asked, your 2FA code too. If it doesn’t, ‘select “Always” for “Require an authentication device”, and click “Update”’ like explained on this page.

  2. On the left side, click on the release you want to ship.

  3. On the “channel” section, click on the link “Release”. If brings you to a new page. If the page remains blank, reload it.

  4. Check the stable box (leave the candidate one checked) and click on Release.

The more complete one: via command line#

  1. Install snapcraft. The simplest way is via docker: docker pull snapcore/snapcraft:stable, then docker run -ti snapcore/snapcraft:stable bash * alternatively: apt-get install snapcraft

  2. snapcraft login. Your credentials will be asked, your 2FA code too. If it doesn’t, ‘select “Always” for “Require an authentication device”, and click “Update”’ like explained on this page.

  3. snapcraft status firefox outputs something like:

Track    Arch    Channel    Version      Revision
esr      amd64   stable     60.0.2esr-2  98
                 candidate  ^            ^
                 beta       ^            ^
                 edge       ^            ^
latest   amd64   stable     60.0.1-2     89
                 candidate  60.0.2-1     97
                 beta       61.0b14-1    101
                 edge       ^            ^

  1. Note the revision of the latest/candidate (aka candidate) snap. In this example: 97

  2. If you don’t see the version you are expecting, list all available revisions by running snapcraft list-revisions firefox | head

  3. snapcraft release firefox $REVISION stable, $REVISION being the number found in the previous (e.g.: 97).

How to manually push a snap to the store, in case automation failed?#

  1. Install snapcraft and login (see previous paragraph)

  2. snapcraft push target.snap --release $CHANNEL, $CHANNEL being one of esr, candidate, beta.

  3. If you forgot --release in the previous command, you can still use snap release [...] (see previous paragraph) to make the snap available to a channel.

Refresh macaroons credentials#

Snaps operate via macaroons to authenticate requests against the Store. These are used by k8s pushsnap scriptworkers to perform operations with the snaps.

When the macaroons token expiry, they need to be refreshed. Specific instructions on how to do that lie within the ubuntu-store.txt in the private repo.

Refreshing collaborators#

Every now and then we need to curate the list of contributors that can handle the snaps. In order to for one to do so, please use the main RelEng account credentials and hop on the collaborators page and make those adjustements.