electron-updater

Cross platform auto-updater for electron apps

Install

There are three main packages that make up the electron-updater.

$ npm install electron-updater --save
$ npm install electron-plugins --save
$ npm install electron-updater-tools -g

The electron-updater package itself runs in your app's main process and does the actual updating. The electron-plugins project specifically loads the plugins downloaded by the updater in the render process. The third project, electron-updater-tools contains various scripts useful for building native electron addons as well as linking plugins during development time.

Usage

Integrate the electron-updater into your electron main process. Below is a simplified example of the Electron Quick Start code with the electron-updater mixed in.

Example main.js

var app = require('app'),
    BrowserWindow = require('browser-window'),
    updater = require('electron-updater')

var mainWindow = null

app.on('ready', function() {
    updater.on('ready', function () {
        mainWindow = new BrowserWindow({width: 800, height: 600})
        mainWindow.loadUrl('file://' + __dirname + '/index.html')
        mainWindow.openDevTools({detach:true})        
        mainWindow.on('closed', function() {
            mainWindow = null;
        })
    })
    updater.on('updateRequired', function () {        
        app.quit();
    })
    updater.on('updateAvailable', function () {
        mainWindow.webContents.send('update-available');
    })
    updater.start()
})

Example index.js (running in render process)

var plugins = require('electron-plugins'),
	ipc = require('ipc')

document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function () {
	var context = { document: document }
	plugins.load(context, function (err, loaded) {
		if(err) return console.error(err)
		console.log('Plugins loaded successfully.')
	})
})

ipc.on('update-available', function () {
	console.log('there is an update available for download')
})

Publishing Updates

There are two kinds of updates you can publish:

• The Application itself
• Plugins

Both kinds of updatable packages are distributed through npm. This means that publishing updates to your application and plugins are essentially done like this:

$ npm pack
$ npm pub

The application will periodically check npm for updates to any packages and update them when it can.

Hosting your own npm server

If you are developing a commercial application, or just want to control distribution yourself, you should host your own packages on your own npm server.

Add a path to your registry in the applications package.json:

  "registry": "http://npm.mycompany.com:4873",

To tell npm to use this registry also, create a .npmrc file in your application root directory containing:

registry=http://npm.mycompany.com:4873

Fortunately, hosting your own npm server is very easy to do with sinopia.

$ npm install sinopia -g
$ sinopia

To run sinopia as a service, you can use forever.

$ npm install forever -g
$ forever start sinopia

Plugins

Plugins are different than normal dependencies. To establish a link to a plugin, add a plugins entry into your applications package.json:

  "dependencies": {
    # ...
  },
  "plugins": {
    "electron-updater-example-plugin": "~0.1.0"
  },

When your application runs it will download and install these plugins into your users AppDirectory.userData() folder. The main benefits of plugins is:

• Gauranteed user directory, does not require elevation to update.
• Supports side-by-side installation, so they can be updated while the app is running.
• Application can be refreshed instead of restarted to apply updates.
• Load arbitrary plugins using electron-plugins, instead of having fixed dependencies only.

In the userData folder there is also a .current file created, which is used to maintain the list of currently installed plugins. You can add items to that file to install non-default plugins.

Distributing binaries

TODO...

Related

See the electron-builder project for creating installers for various platforms.