During the build step, the cmake plugins calls cmake with the path to the src as the argument. This is wrong. The src is copied to the build dir precisely to get the build step to run from the build dir. What makes this worse is that if people run something with the prepare keyword that modifies the build dir, then cmake will ignore those modifications. To reproduce: $ cd integration_tests/snaps/cmake-hello # Add this to the cmake part: sed -i "s/CMake world/CMake build dir world/" test.c $ snapcraft $ bin/cmake-hello # This should print the patched string: It's a CMake build dir world # Instead, it prints the original