Installation

Prerequisites

To run the Snap Store Proxy, you will need:

Getting started

First, if your network requires an HTTPS proxy to get to the above domains, you must first configure snapd on the installation server to use that HTTPS proxy in order to be able to install the snap-store-proxy snap package.

Do this by adding the appropriate environment variables (http_proxy, https_proxy) to the server’s /etc/environment file, and restarting snapd:

sudo systemctl restart snapd

Installing the stable release of the Snap Store Proxy is as simple as:

sudo snap install snap-store-proxy

This will install the snap, which provides a collection of systemd services, and the snap-proxy CLI tool to control the proxy.

Domain configuration

The Snap Store Proxy will require a domain or IP address to be set for the configuration and access by other devices, e.g.:

sudo snap-proxy config proxy.domain="snaps.myorg.internal"

This can be done after the database is created, but is required before registration can succeed.

Database

When setting up a Snap Store Proxy for production usage, we recommend you have a properly configured PostgreSQL service set up, with backups and possibly HA. However, if you are evaluating the Snap Store Proxy or using it in a local deployment, you can use a local PostgreSQL.

The example below illustrates the expected PostgreSQL set up in terms of a role, database, and a database extension that are required by the Snap Store Proxy.

Example database setup

Ensure that proper PostgreSQL database, user and database extensions are set up. This can be done by adjusting the following script to your needs and running it using psql as your PostgreSQL server superuser:

CREATE ROLE "snapproxy-user" LOGIN CREATEROLE PASSWORD 'snapproxy-password';

CREATE DATABASE "snapproxy-db" OWNER "snapproxy-user";

\connect "snapproxy-db"

CREATE EXTENSION "btree_gist";

Simple local Ubuntu setup can look like this:

  1. Install PostgreSQL

     sudo apt install postgresql

  2. Save the above PostgreSQL script as proxydb.sql and run it:

     sudo -u postgres psql < proxydb.sql

Configure the Snap Store Proxy database

Once the database is prepared, set the connection string:

sudo snap-proxy config proxy.db.connection="postgresql://snapproxy-user@localhost:5432/snapproxy-db"

After doing this, you will be prompted to enter the password for that PostgreSQL user.

The connection string format is detailed in the libpq documentation.

Network connectivity

You can check that the Proxy can access all the network locations it needs to with:

snap-proxy check-connections

If you require traffic between your Snap Store Proxy and the internet to go via another HTTP proxy, you can configure your Snap Store Proxy to do so with:

sudo snap-proxy config proxy.https.proxy="https://myproxy.internal:3128"

Snap Store Proxy also uses the https_proxy environment variable if it’s set. http_proxy is ignored as all outgoing traffic is encrypted.

CA certificates

For verifying outgoing HTTPS communication, Snap Store Proxy bundles a set of root CAs from its base Ubuntu based snap.

On Ubuntu, the system trust store can be modified using update-ca-certificates as needed and snap-store-proxy will honour these changes by default (it might require a restart sudo snap restart snap-store-proxy).

You can also override this default behaviour and configure your Snap Store Proxy to only trust a specific list of CAs:

cat your-ca.crt another-ca.crt | sudo snap-proxy use-ca-certs

This can be useful in cases when you want your Snap Store Proxy to only trust your internal CA for example.

To reset the CA certificates back to the system defaults, run:

sudo snap-proxy remove-ca-certs

Next step

Register your Snap Store Proxy.