Rockcraft 1.15 release notes¶

13 October 2025

Learn about the new features, changes, and fixes introduced in Rockcraft 1.15. 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 1.15 brings the following features, integrations, and improvements.

Support for interim Ubuntu bases¶

Rockcraft now supports packing rocks built with interim Ubuntu bases, starting with ubuntu@25.10. Since this version of Ubuntu is in development at time of release, to select this base you must also set build-base: devel.

Improved support for unmaintained bases¶

When you pack rocks with Ubuntu bases that have reached the end of their standard support, you must now acknowledge that the base is unmaintained. At the time of release, this affects the ubuntu@20.04 base. Standard support for it ended on 31 May, 2025.

See Specify a base for instructions on how to pack your rock under these circumstances.

Improved usrmerge support¶

We have made strides in adapting the build process to the usrmerged filesystem commonly found in Linux distributions, Ubuntu included. Going forward, projects built on base ubuntu@25.10 can handle usrmerge conflicts better, making parts compatible with a broader share of Debian packages and Chisel slices.

See Usrmerge implementation for details on the motivation for the change and ways to control the behavior on a per-project basis.

Python plugin for `ubuntu@25.10` base¶

The behavior of the Python plugin for Rockcraft projects with base ubuntu@25.10 and higher has been significantly changed to address weaknesses in the previous implementation.

The Python plugin (ubuntu@25.10) is largely compatible with existing projects but has better support for usrmerge. It’s considered experimental while the ubuntu@25.10 base is still in development.

Minor features¶

Rockcraft 1.15 brings the following minor changes.

Rockcraft project file¶

The minimum length of the name key has been changed from 3 characters to 1.

Lifecycle commands¶

When you run a lifecycle command with --debug, Rockcraft will now print the error before opening a shell into the build environment.

`stage-packages`¶

Fixed an issue that caused Apt to warn about directory ownership when including stage-packages.

Overlays¶

The superfluous message unknown argument ignored: lazytime that appeared when the project includes overlay-packages or overlay-script has been removed.
The detection of collisions between files coming from the overlay and from regular builds has been further improved.

Autotools plugin¶

The Autotools plugin now supports the parts.<part-name>.disable-parallel key to force builds using the plugin to run using a single job.

Documentation for bases¶

We’ve added Specify a base, a how-to guide that covers all the different cases for bases in a rock.

Documentation for 12-factor app extensions¶

The tutorial and reference pages for all 12-factor app extensions were improved based on user feedback. Additionally, links to the documentation and to the Matrix channel have been added to project files generated by the init command.

Documentation submodule name change¶

The Git submodule containing documentation components has been renamed to sphinx-docs-starter-pack to match its parent repository.

If you’re a returning contributor to the project, after you pull the latest commits, run the following commands in your local repository to sync the submodule change:

git submodule sync
git submodule update --init --recursive
git clean -ffd

Contributors¶

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

@alesancor1, @bepri, @cjdcordeiro, @erinecon, @jahn-junior, @javierdelapuente, @lengau, @medubelko, @tigarmo, and @upils.