Rockcraft 1.17 release notes

9 February 2026

Learn about the new features, changes, and fixes introduced in Rockcraft 1.17. 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 1.17 brings the following features, integrations, and improvements.

Gradle plugin

The Gradle plugin now supports the self-contained build-attribute, to allow building Gradle projects from dependencies that are fully declared in the Rockcraft project file.

Additionally, the plugin now supports the gradle-use-daemon key, which enables the Gradle Daemon during build.

Project schema included in snap

The JSON Schema for the rockcraft.yaml project file is now included in the Rockcraft snap. The schema is located at the schema/rockcraft.json path inside the snap.

Python compilation with the uv plugin

The uv plugin now compiles Python bytecode by default. This is desirable for most projects, as it improves the startup time of Python apps. To disable bytecode compilation, set the UV_COMPILE_BYTECODE environment variable to 0 in the part’s build-environment key.

Minor features

Rockcraft 1.17 brings the following minor changes.

Better support for parent POMs

The Maven-based plugins now correctly support projects where the groupId is defined in a parent POM.

12-factor app rocks

The init profiles for the 12-factor app extensions now use bare bases, which makes leaner rocks by default and reduces the attack surface for vulnerabilities.

Additionally, rocks created with a 12-factor app extension now include a command interpreter on /bin/sh, which allows them to work correctly with the juju ssh command.

Documentation improvements

We’ve made improvements to the documentation:

  • Corrected the output of the “Hello World” tutorial.

  • Fixed various broken links across the documentation.

  • Updated the warning about the interaction between Docker and LXD instances.

Fixed bugs and issues

The following issues have been resolved in Rockcraft 1.17.

Rockcraft 1.17.0

  • #1069 schema: ubuntu@26.04 should not be a valid build-base for now.

  • craft-application #986 craft-application is using outdated distro-support package.

Rockcraft 1.17.1

  • The version of Chisel included in Rockcraft correctly handles slices for the ubuntu@26.04 base.

Contributors

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

@asanvaq, @alithethird, @bepri, @canon-cat, @cjdcordeiro, @cmatsuoka, @erinecon, @Guillaumebeuzeboc, @Guno327, @javierdelapuente, @jahn-junior, @jonathan-conder, @lengau, @medubelko, @smethnani, @steinbro, @tigarmo, and @zhijie-yang.