Make Snaps Work With A Nonstandard Path

Problem

Snapcraft uses apparmor to contain software running within the snap, and to ensure it doesn’t write to the system outside of expected areas. However, this leads to issues when files are in nonstandard locations, such as your home directory residing somewhere like /home/nethome/[user] for NFS mounted home directories.

Solution

The solution is to make apparmor aware of new home directory locations.

This can be done in one of two ways.

Interactively, with this command:

$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure apparmor

Or, alternatively, you can run this one-liner to provide the correct configuration, assuming your alternate homedir is in /home/nethome/USER:

$ echo "@{HOMEDIRS}+=/home/nethome/" | sudo tee /etc/apparmor.d/tunables/home.d/alt-homedir

This should now work, without needing to restart any services, allowing snaps to correctly write to your home directory not at /home.