electron-auto-update

A user friendly way of having your Electron apps auto-update

This package builds upon the great work done by electron-builder and electron-updater, both of which make it really easy for you to package and publish your Electron apps. The latter package works wonders for handling the internals of auto-updating your application.

electron-auto-update aims to make the process of auto-updating a little more user-friendly, by presenting a dialog box when an update has been downloaded and is ready to be installed, which happens upon relaunch of the application. It will also check for updates on a regular frequency.

Features

• Checks for updates at a regular interval (defaults to each hour)
• Automatically downloads updates as they become available
• Displays a dialog window and prompts the user to relaunch to update
• Reminds users that an update is ready to be installed

Coming soon

• Works with applications installed via snapcraft

Usage

Your project should already be using electron-builder to package and publish your application. Ensure you have the publish configuration setup in your package.json file as electron-auto-update will use that configuration for detecting new versions available for update.

const {autoUpdate} = require('electron-auto-update');

autoUpdate();

If you would like to manually trigger an update check, for example, via a menu bar in a scenario where the user has chosen not to receive future notifications, then you can use the triggerUpdateCheck() method like so:

const {autoUpdate} = require('electron-auto-update');

// Assign the updater to a variable that you can call manually
const updater = autoUpdate();

// Call at some point later:
updater.triggerUpdateCheck();

API

autoUpdate(options?)

Will setup a regular check for updates using any additonal options specified.

options

Type: object

checkFrequency

Type: integer
Default: 3600000

The frequency in milliseconds to check for updates. Defaults to 1 hour.

Development

npm install
npm test
np