Snap

Canonical’s snap installs sandboxed, self-updating packages.

snaps refresh themselves on a schedule, so upgrade merely forces a snap refresh sooner. No operation is marked sudo: the snapd daemon performs the privileged work.

Note

snap localizes and colorizes its table headers with no terminal detection. mpm pins nothing to English: --color=never strips the ANSI, the header row is dropped, and every row is split on whitespace and read by column position, so the translated headers never reach the parser.

Note

snap refresh --list reports only the available version, so outdated looks each installed version up by ID from the cached installed set. search runs snap find, which matches summaries as well as names, so mpm refilters the results.

Platforms

  • 🅱️ BSD

  • 🐧 Linux

  • ⨂ Unix

Operations

Operation

Supported

Notes

installed

✓

outdated

✓

search

✓

exact and extended search backfilled by mpm

install

✓

upgrade

✓

upgrade_all

✓

remove

✓

sync

cleanup

Ecosystem

  • Accepted purl types: pkg:snap

Usage

$ mpm --snap installed
$ mpm --snap search "query"
$ mpm --snap upgrade --all
$ mpm install pkg:snap/hello
$ mpm --dry-run --snap upgrade --all

Every example above accepts --dry-run, which simulates the underlying manager calls without touching the system: the safe way to watch what mpm would do before trusting it.

Deselect the manager for a single run with --no-snap, disable it from your configuration, or tune its invocation attributes with per-manager overrides.

Command line

  • CLI names, in lookup order: snap

  • Arguments forced after each call: --color=never

The version is probed by running:

$ snap --version
snap       2.44.1
snapd      2.44.1
series     16
linuxmint  19.3
kernel     4.15.0-91-generic

and extracted with:

r"snap\s+(?P<version>\S+)"

Privilege escalation

mpm runs this manager as the current user and never prepends sudo by default. Flip the policy for its privileged operations with --sudo or the per-manager sudo override.

See privilege escalation for the full policy.

Cooldown

State of Snap’s release-age gating, from the cooldown support table:

  • Status: ➖ N/A (risk channels stable/candidate/beta/edge, plus snap refresh --hold up to 90 days)

  • Mechanism: snap refresh --hold

  • Reference: Snap docs

With --cooldown set, mpm skips this manager’s install and upgrade operations rather than run them unguarded (fail-closed); --allow-unsupported-managers opts back in.

Reference traces

Raw native outputs captured in the manager source: the reference mpm’s parsers were written against. If you know Snap well and a transcript below looks wrong, or a newer release changed its output format, report it.

$ snap list --color=never
Name    Version    Rev   Aufzeichnung   Herausgeber     Hinweise
core    16-2.44.1  8935  latest/stable  canonical✓      core
wechat  2.0        7     latest/stable  ubuntu-dawndiy  -
pdftk   2.02-4     9     latest/stable  smoser          -

$ snap refresh --list --color=never
Name            Version  Rev  Herausgeber     Hinweise
standard-notes  3.3.5    8    standardnotes✓  -