Rockcraft 1.16 release notes¶

1 December 2025

Learn about the new features, changes, and fixes introduced in Rockcraft 1.16. For information about the Rockcraft release cycle, see the Release policy and schedule.

Requirements and compatibility¶

To run Rockcraft, a system requires the following minimum hardware and installed software. These requirements apply to local hosts as well as VMs and container hosts.

Minimum hardware requirements¶

AMD64, ARM64, ARMv7-M, RISC-V 64-bit, PowerPC 64-bit little-endian, or S390x processor
2GB RAM
10GB available storage space
Internet access for remote software sources and the Snap Store

Platform requirements¶

Platform	Version	Software requirements
GNU/Linux	Popular distributions that ship with systemd and are compatible with snapd	systemd

What’s new¶

Rockcraft 1.16 brings the following features, integrations, and improvements.

`ubuntu@26.04` base¶

Rockcraft now supports ubuntu@26.04 as a base. Since this version of Ubuntu is in development at time of release, to select this base you must also set build-base: devel.

Stabilized `ubuntu@25.10` base¶

The ubuntu@25.10 base is now fully supported and no longer requires build-base: devel.

Availability on RISC-V 64-bit and armhf¶

Rockcraft is once again available on RISC-V 64-bit and armhf systems.

JLink plugin¶

The JLink plugin supports two new keys.

jlink-modules declares the complete list of modules to include in the OpenJDK image
jlink-multi-release specifies the OpenJDK release version to use for multi-release JARs

Minor features¶

Rockcraft 1.16 brings the following minor changes.

Improved `rockcraft.yaml` Documentation¶

We refreshed the rockcraft.yaml reference. The page covers all keys, and their descriptions and examples are now sourced from the codebase, so they will stay up-to-date as Rockcraft changes.

The reference has also been reorganized to better reflect idiomatic project file structure and the new platforms keys.

Documentation for 12-factor app extensions¶

Set up a 12-Factor app rock now contains the steps needed to override the rock’s default command that the 12-factor app extensions provide.

Backwards-incompatible changes¶

The following changes are incompatible with previous versions of Rockcraft.

Removed character support in platform names¶

Platform names no longer support forward slashes (/).

Fixed bugs and issues¶

The following issues have been resolved in Rockcraft 1.16.

Rockcraft 1.16.0¶

#992 Architecture field in .rock/metadata.yaml is serialized incorrectly.
#1022 entrypoint-service rejects empty argument list in 1.15 even though this previously worked

Contributors¶

We would like to express a big thank you to all the people who contributed to this release.

@asanvaq, @bepri, @erinecon, @jahn-junior, @javierdelapuente, @lengau, @medubelko, @steinbro, and @tigarmo.