Linux Administration Cookbook

How it works...

Snaps work like any other package manager, installing and managing packages brought in from a repository on your system.

You'll also have noticed the core installation on our list of installed snaps; this is effectively the base platform that snaps work on top of.

snapd is the daemon that underpins snaps; it's the environment that manages the installed snaps, dealing with installs, updates, and deletion of old versions.

When you install a snap, what you actually download is a read-only squashfs file that lives in /var/lib/snapd/snaps/:

$ lscore_5548.snap  lxd_8959.snap  partial

The numbers are snap revision numbers.

When these squashfs images are mounted by snapd, you can see them personified as loop devices with df:

$ df -h ...