Monitoring your snaps for security updates February 1, 2019

Some time ago we started alerting publishers when their stage-packages received a security update since the last time they built a snap. We wanted to create the right balance for the alerts and so the service currently will only alert you when there are new security updates against your stage-packages. In this manner, you can choose not to rebuild your snap (eg, since it doesn’t use the affected functionality of the vulnerable package) and not be nagged every day that you are out of date.

As nice as that is, sometimes you want to check these things yourself or perhaps hook the alerts into some form of automation or tool. While the review-tools had all of the pieces so you could do this, it wasn’t as straightforward as it could be. Now with the latest stable revision of the review-tools, this is easy:

$ sudo snap install review-tools
$ review-tools.check-notices \
  ~/snap/review-tools/common/review-tools_656.snap
{'review-tools': {'656': {'libapt-inst2.0': ['3863-1'],
                          'libapt-pkg5.0': ['3863-1'],
                          'libssl1.0.0': ['3840-1'],
                          'openssl': ['3840-1'],
                          'python3-lxml': ['3841-1']}}}

The review-tools are a strict mode snap and while it plugs the home interface, that is only for convenience, so I typically disconnect the interface and put things in its SNAP_USER_COMMON directory, like I did above.

Since now it is super easy to check a snap on disk, with a little scripting and a cron job, you can generate a machine readable report whenever you want. Eg, can do something like the following:

$ cat ~/bin/check-snaps
#!/bin/sh
set -e

snaps="review-tools/stable rsync-jdstrand/edge"

tmpdir=$(mktemp -d -p "$HOME/snap/review-tools/common")
cleanup() {
    rm -fr "$tmpdir"
}
trap cleanup EXIT HUP INT QUIT TERM

cd "$tmpdir" || exit 1
for i in $snaps ; do
    snap=$(echo "$i" | cut -d '/' -f 1)
    channel=$(echo "$i" | cut -d '/' -f 2)
    snap download "$snap" "--$channel" >/dev/null
done
cd - >/dev/null || exit 1

/snap/bin/review-tools.check-notices "$tmpdir"/*.snap

or if  you already have the snaps on disk somewhere, just do:

$ /snap/bin/review-tools.check-notices /path/to/snaps/*.snap

Now can add the above to cron or some automation tool as a reminder of what needs updates. Enjoy!