What are snaps in ros2?

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Hi! Good question. I work for Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu. I’m part of the robotics team. Snaps is one of the many tools we developed for developers to easily deploy and manage their applications.

Snap offers you a way to deploy your ROS applications. If you are familiar with Ubuntu, you probably already downloaded packages with APT. Well, Snap is an alternative way to share and download applications.

Snap bundles all the necessary dependencies. This means that the snap you download is all you need; it is self-contained. The snap package doesn't only contain your application, but all the libraries necessary to run it. This makes your software stable, and you can even deploy ROS 2 Humble applications on Ubuntu 18.04 for instance.

Snaps are running in a confined environment. Snaps are isolated from the host and only have access to what you explicitly gave access to. If you want your snap to access the network, you must declare it.

Snaps and their updates can be shared easily on the Snapstore. Snaps are updated automatically when an update is available. If you are a developer, you can upload the update, and it will deploy to your user/robots automatically.

These are only a few highlights,

If you are interested as a ROS snap user, you can give a shot at the Plotjuggler or Gazebo.

If you are interested as a ROS developer to deploy your application, have a look at the snapcraft quick-start documentation as well as the snapcraft robotics documentation.

This is your good base tutorial about snap: https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/create-y...

A snap is a bundle of an app and its dependencies that works without modification across many different Linux distributions. Snaps are discoverable and installable from the Snap Store (...)

It allows you to combine everything you need for "publishing" your software application with its dependencies (e.g. additional libraries, plugins etc.).