Authenticate¶

To manage and publish snaps on a snap store, you must be logged in to a Snapcraft developer account. File-based authentication is also available for deployments where login isn’t possible or desired, such as private networks.

Log in to your Snapcraft account¶

To log in to your Snapcraft developer account from the terminal, run:

snapcraft login

This will prompt you to enter your email, password, and, if applicable, your second factor authentication code.

Export Snapcraft account credentials¶

Note

Credentials exported with Snapcraft 7 can only be used with Snapcraft 7 or higher.

To export Snapcraft account credentials, run the export-login command followed by a name for the resulting credentials file:

snapcraft export-login <credentials-filename>

Like snapcraft login, this will prompt you to enter your email, password, and second factor authentication code. Once entered, your account credentials will be exported to a file in your current directory with the name you specified.

By default, the exported credentials will have access to all snaps, channels, and ACLs associated with your account. To limit this access, you can append any of the following options to the previous command:

Option	Argument
`--snaps`	Comma-separated list of allowed snaps
`--channels`	Comma-separated list of allowed channels
`--acls`	Comma-separated list of allowed ACLs
`--expires`	The date and time (in ISO 8601) the exported credentials will expire.

Authenticate with exported account credentials¶

To authenticate with exported credentials, the contents of the credentials file must be placed in the SNAPCRAFT_STORE_CREDENTIALS environment variable. This can be accomplished by running:

export SNAPCRAFT_STORE_CREDENTIALS=$(cat <credentials-filename>)

On older versions of Snapcraft, you can also authenticate with exported credentials by running:

snapcraft login --with <credentials-filename>

Verify exported account credentials¶

After authenticating with a file, you can verify that your account credentials are working with:

snapcraft whoami

This should output your account information as follows:

~$ snapcraft whoami

email: <account-email>username: <account-name>id: <account-id>permissions: package_access, package_manage, package_metrics,package_push, package_register, package_release, package_updatechannels: no restrictionsexpires: 2026-03-17T14:29:45.000Z

Authenticate with a keyring¶

On systems where you wish to remain logged in, run snapcraft login. Snapcraft will attempt to use the system keyring. If no keyrings are installed or initialized, Snapcraft will fall back to file-based credential storage. The file-based storage is managed by Snapcraft. If you wish to import/export credentials, refer to the previous sections.

Note that snapcraft login sometimes fails to unlock GNOME keyring when accessing a Linux system with a desktop environment from a virtual console or SSH. GNOME keyring will not present a CLI password prompt to unlock the keyring, causing Snapcraft to hang and timeout.