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();