Automatic update system

[Dukc]

On Thursday, 26 November 2020 at 12:13:59 UTC, vnr wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I have a program written in D which is open-source on GitHub.
>
> I would appreciate it if, when I release a new version, users 
> would be notified by the program and that it offers an 
> automatic update, i.e. the user doesn't have to reinstall the 
> whole repository himself, but that it is updated automatically.
>
> I haven't found any packages that directly meet my needs, but 
> in the meantime I imagine that I will have to use the GitHub 
> API, as well as Curl to make such a system.
>
> Do you have any resources or suggestions as to how I could 
> implement this? Thank you!

Make it a DUB package. It does not update 100% automatically, but 
notifies when updates are available.

You could also make an auto-updater by hand, but that requires a 
networking library and won't work anyway if the user does not 
have permissions to change the executable. This is often the 
case, as the often recommended places to store the programs are 
`/usr/bin/` or `c:/program files/`. Neither is accessible by 
default priviledges. In addition, it is a lot more work to 
implement than making a dub package. I don't recomment absent a 
strong reason.

If you publish your program in some other package format (apt, 
rpm, flatpak or nix for example), you can try to get your package 
into some official repository. There you can publish updates 
easily, and the program gets updated among the regular software 
updates the users do.