Canonical has announced Enterprise Store, a self-hosted service designed to give organizations greater control over the distribution of snaps and charms across restricted, regulated, and disconnected environments.
Formerly Snap Store Proxy, Enterprise Store acts as an on-premises intermediary between client systems and Canonical’s public Snap Store. Devices connect through the local service, enabling administrators to manage outbound access and cache packages to reduce bandwidth and speed up deployments.
A key feature is granular revision control. Administrators can override upstream snap revisions and pin systems to tested and approved versions, preventing unplanned updates from reaching production machines.
Importantly, Enterprise Store can operate fully offline. In air-gapped mode, required snaps and metadata are exported from an internet-connected system, transferred to the isolated network, and imported into the local store. Devices can then install and update packages without accessing Canonical’s public infrastructure.
Alongside snaps, the service can distribute charms and charm bundles through a local Charmhub endpoint. Canonical notes that this charm functionality is currently intended for offline deployments, while organizations using Kubernetes charms must provide a separate local OCI registry for the required container images.
In situations where software distribution must remain continuously available, Enterprise Store supports high-availability deployments using multiple instances behind a reverse proxy. Requests can therefore be directed to another active unit when one of the store servers becomes unavailable.
Canonical targets Enterprise Store at businesses managing large Ubuntu estates, edge devices, private infrastructure, or systems with strict security and compliance requirements. It may also benefit organizations that avoid snaps due to lack of direct access to the public Snap Store.
The good news is that Enterprise Store is included with Ubuntu Pro. Since Ubuntu Pro is free for personal use, home users and small labs can also try the service without paying for a commercial subscription. According to Canonical’s documentation, a commercial license is required for deployments with more than 25 connected clients.
Finally, keep in mind that Enterprise Store does not replace APT repositories or provide a universal Linux package mirror. Its scope remains focused on Canonical’s snap and charm ecosystems, providing a centralized way to cache software, approve specific revisions, serve isolated systems, and control how updates reach production infrastructure.
For additional details, see Canonical’s official announcement.
