go-selfupdate

Enable your Golang applications to self update. Inspired by Chrome based on Heroku's hk.

Features

• Tested on Mac, Linux, Arm, and Windows
• Creates binary diffs with bsdiff allowing small incremental updates
• Falls back to full binary update if diff fails to match SHA

QuickStart

Install library and update/patch creation utility

go install github.com/sanbornm/go-selfupdate/cmd/go-selfupdate@latest

Enable your App to Self Update

go get -u github.com/sanbornm/go-selfupdate/...

var updater = &selfupdate.Updater{
	CurrentVersion: version, // the current version of your app used to determine if an update is necessary
	// these endpoints can be the same if everything is hosted in the same place
	ApiURL:         "http://updates.yourdomain.com/", // endpoint to get update manifest
	BinURL:         "http://updates.yourdomain.com/", // endpoint to get full binaries
	DiffURL:        "http://updates.yourdomain.com/", // endpoint to get binary diff/patches
	Dir:            "update/",                        // directory to store temporary state files related to go-selfupdate
	CmdName:        "myapp",                          // your app's name (must correspond to app name hosting the updates)
	// app name allows you to serve updates for multiple apps on the same server/endpoint
}

// go look for an update when your app starts up
if updater != nil {
	go updater.BackgroundRun()
}
// your app continues to run...

Push Out and Update

go-selfupdate path-to-your-app the-version
go-selfupdate myapp 1.2

By default this will create a folder in your project called public. You can then rsync or transfer this to your webserver or S3. To change the output directory use -o flag.

If you are cross compiling you can specify a directory:

go-selfupdate /tmp/mybinares/ 1.2

The directory should contain files with the name, $GOOS-$ARCH. Example:

windows-386
darwin-amd64
linux-arm

If you are using goxc you can output the files with this naming format by specifying this config:

"OutPath": "{{.Dest}}{{.PS}}{{.Version}}{{.PS}}{{.Os}}-{{.Arch}}",

Update Protocol

GET yourserver.com/appname/linux-amd64.json

200 ok
{
	"Version": "2",
	"Sha256": "..." // base64
}

then

GET patches.yourserver.com/appname/1.1/1.2/linux-amd64

200 ok
[bsdiff data]

or

GET fullbins.yourserver.com/appname/1.0/linux-amd64.gz

200 ok
[gzipped executable data]

The only required files are <appname>/<os>-<arch>.json and <appname>/<latest>/<os>-<arch>.gz everything else is optional. If you wanted to you could skip using go-selfupdate CLI tool and generate these two files manually or with another tool.