Nikola: Nikola Available as a Snap

One of the larger challenges for free software developers is getting our software in the hands of the public, promptly, with the least amount of effort. Let's say that, so far, the least amount of effort has been a lot of effort.

For windows, we need to do lots of work I, personally don't want to do, so Nikola's possible windows users are left with the path of doing things like a developer, and building from source. The same for OSX users.

On Linux, thanks to the effort of a bunch of people (thanks y'all!) Nikola is available as a distro package of one sort or another for most distributions, so you can get it easily. But ... you usually will not get the latest release of Nikola, unless you are an Arch user.

I am happy to announce there is an alternative path that is a real improvement for a large number of Linux users, specifically Ubuntu users (disclaimer: I work for Canonical, I like Canonical, and I did this)

For a while I have been building Nikola as a snap after every release. But what's a snap?

A snap is a new package format that runs applications safely in a confined sandbox. That means that the packages don't need to go through as complicated a process as traditional Linux distro packages. Also, they are much, much, much easier to create.

So, if you are on a recent Ubuntu, or in one of the other distros where snaps work you can get Nikola 7.8.1 and keep it up to date, probably never more than a day behind the current release by installing it through snap:

$ snap install nikola
nikola (stable) 7.8.1 from 'ralsina' installed

Then you need to give Nikola permission to write in your home folder:

$ snap connect nikola:home core:home

And permission to use the network:

$ snap connect nikola:network core:network
$ snap connect nikola:network-bind core:network-bind

That is all. It's not, however perfect. There are a few functions of Nikola that won't currently work whe used in this way:

• Some plugins that require installing 3rd party software will not work. For example, the asciidoc compiler will not be able to call asciidoc
• The nikola deploy command will not work because the sandbox prevents Nikola from calling 3rd party commands. Probably the same is true about nikola github_deploy. You will have to use scripts or just run the deployment commands manually.
• The -b option of nikola serve and nikola auto, which opens the site in a browser, will not work. You will have to open the site manually.
• The snapped Nikola takes slightly longer to start than a regular setup (about half a second in my system)

There will also be a daily snapshot of the current code available in the snap "edge channel", as soon as I can automate it via a 3rd party build service.