How to sideload my own/snapcraft example app?

Question

Just trying snappy for the first time, wanting to develop an app but would obviously want to test it before pushing it to the app store. I've been through the snapcraft tutorial but once you've created a snap how do you get it into a snappy machine?

I've seen posts about 'sideloading'(?) apps but can't work out how?

As a start - how would I load one of the snapcraft example apps into my KVM snappy instance? (one of the ones not in the app store)

Thanks!

Answer 1

Note that as you probably haven't signed your snap you will probably have to run:

sudo snap install /path_to_yoursnap/snapname.snap 

after the scp

You can also try a snappy-remote install, which should look like this:

snappy-remote --url=ssh://ubuntu@webdm.local/ install snapname.snap

Answer 2

Once you build the snap either using snappy build or snapcraft, sideloading is simply the process of installing your snap without going through the store (exactly what you're trying to do). An analog to this in the Debian packaging world would be installing a .deb via dpkg instead of using apt-get.

If you have SSH enabled on your KVM instance, use scp to transfer the generated .snap over. Once you're there, simply run sudo snap install /path/to/my.snap on the KVM instance, and you just sideloaded it. You'll see it now if you run snappy list.