Exercism CLI Guide For Ubuntu Doesn't Mention Snap

MechoJim · January 30, 2025, 8:23pm

Hi, I went through this long guide of trying to figure out which installer to download (which by the way the names don’t even match up), but then after I installed it still didn’t work.

Then after all that when it didn’t work I see the error that tells me to just run “sudo snap install exercism”

Really?? Why is that not the recommended way in the first place???

kotp · January 30, 2025, 8:28pm

The snap package is not recommended.

My recommendation is to download the executable (or build it) and stick the executable in userspace, likely in ~/bin which on Ubuntu, if it exists, will be inserted into your $PATH and will then “just work”.

So no installer required. And no administrative/root/sudo privileges granted or necessary.

BNAndras · January 30, 2025, 9:40pm

I’m curious about this. What names aren’t matching up? In the past, folks using macOS including myself have been thrown by builds referring to Darwin. The CLI is written in Go so that naming convention is inherited from there because macOS runs on top of Darwin loosely speaking.

SleeplessByte · January 30, 2025, 9:48pm

github.com/exercism/cli

Deprecate the snap build

opened 04:53PM - 24 Nov 20 UTC

NobbZ

With quite some regularity there are issues reported with the snap build. * I…t prints instructions to use the opaque and absolute snap path to binary to execute commands. One should never run those directly * It creates config within the sandbox but searches for them in the user dir when trying to read them * It It sometimes doesn't seem to have permissions to create the users config in `~/.config` And there have been other weird things reported in the gitter where the student didn't create a bug report here. No one of the maintainers of the CLI seems able to reproduce the issues, even when using snap on their own. Therefore my conclusion of this issue is, that the snap-sandbox is also a blackbox for us that introduces unsolvable problems. Since the introduction of the snap, requests for help with installation problems have massively increased in gitter instead of getting less. The majority of issues are because of snap weirdnesses, and solved by removing the snap replacing it by a manual installation. Second is beeing confused about the unpack location in a manual installation. Third is not having installed snap properly before trying to use it to install exercism (This ranking is based on my personal perceiption and only includes linux derivations) And even though I still do not like the idea of having a not-managed-by-the-package-manager-program on the computer, I realy think, that creating a *simple* shell script, which downloads the binary for the current platform, moves it to `~/bin` and prints a message that one has to add `export PATH=~/bin:"$PATH"` to the `~/.bashrc` or `~/.zshrc` respectively or equivalent commands to equivalent files in any other shell would be the best thing to do. Students then could install by a `curl https://exercism.io/get-exercism | sh` or similar.

The snap package is really a last resort and we’d like to get rid of it tbh.

If you provide us with your OS and environment, perhaps we can help you get the Exercism CLI working?