Re: Require suggestions on feature #5766 - Mailing list pgadmin-hackers

Hi

On Thu, 28 Nov 2024 at 11:38, Anil Sahoo <anil.sahoo@enterprisedb.com> wrote:

Hi Dave,

I have mentioned the requirements for the deployment server to add auto-update in macOs systems.

The frontend will request deployment server with Accept: application/json and the current version of pgAdmin and the architecture of macOs system and server will check if any update is available or not, if update available then server responds with status code 200 OK  and sends the below format JSON response in the body.

Example of deployment url: https://your-deployment-url.com/update/darwin/8.12

Example of response:

{
    "url": "https://your-deployment-url.com/your-app-8.13-darwin.zip",
    "name": "8.13",
    "notes": "Theses are some release notes innit",
    "pub_date": "2024-09-18T12:29:53+01:00"
}

Here url is mandatory and others are optional.

Squirrel will request "url" with Accept: application/zip and only supports installing ZIP updates.

"pub_date" if present must be formatted according to ISO 8601.

If no update is required, the server must respond with a status code of 204 No Content.

Ah, OK - so it's just the metadata. We can handle that pretty easily in the pgaweb code.

 

And for Windows systems, Electron recommended to use electron-winstaller or electron forge as using these packages will use Squirrel.Windows for creating windows installer and that will help in triggering custom launch events and that can be handled by our application for proper setup. But what I think is, as we are using Inno setup for creating our Windows installer, we can try updating our application with existing way only, if something does not work then we have the option to change our installer creation process.

So one thing that springs to mind is that on Windows, this is only likely to work with per-user installations, however, generally the default is for machine-wide installations. Have you given that any thought?

 

Thanks,

Anil

On Wed, Nov 27, 2024 at 10:34 PM Dave Page <dpage@pgadmin.org> wrote:

Hi!

On Wed, 27 Nov 2024 at 07:58, Anil Sahoo <anil.sahoo@enterprisedb.com> wrote:

Hi Dave/Team,

I am currently working on the auto-update feature of pgAdmin 4 desktop application, #5766.

As we are using Electron for shipping our desktop application, I have gone through some possible ways we can implement the auto update of the app.

I found 2 most popular ways, that are

1. Use builtin electron’s autoUpdater (Uses the Squirrel framework & Available for Mac, Windows)
2. Use electron-builder and electron-updater packages (Available for Mac, Windows and Linux systems)

Linux systems:

• Builtin Electron’s autoUpdater support is not available.
• electron-builder and electron-updater can be used, but need to change the whole build process. Also most apps like VS code, Chrome, etc does not support auto-update of apps on linux systems. 

We should not try to auto-update on Linux, because we're using the platform native packaging and auto-updating will cause nasty problems with that.

 

Mac systems:

• We can use the builtin Electron’s autoUpdater to add auto-update feature to macOs systems, It is simple and easy to configure. We need a minor modification in our build process i.e. as we are supporting Intel and Apple silicon chips, deployment url will have 2 zip files and each zip file will hold the build for arm64 and x86_64.
• electron-builder and electron-updater can be used. With this, we have to change the whole build process. 

Windows systems:

• We can use the builtin Electron’s autoUpdater to add auto-update feature to windows systems, Here also we need to change our build process. Electron’s docs recommend using electron-winstaller or electron forge to create the installer and some extra changes are needed in the deployment server.
• electron-builder and electron-updater can be used. With this, we have to change the whole build process. 

As Electron's builtin autoUpdater is easy to use so for now we can move with the auto-update of the pgAdmin app on macOs systems as it requires minimal changes.

That certainly sounds like the better option. A couple of questions:

- What changes are required in the deployment server? We are very limited here, as we deploy through the postgresql.org infrastructure.

- Whilst the docs (for Windows) recommend using electron-winstaller or electron forge, can you confirm one of them *must* be used? Our current installer is pretty standard in the way it works, so I'm curious to know if we would actually need to change technology for a specific reason.

Thanks!

 

--

Dave Page

pgAdmin: https://www.pgadmin.org

PostgreSQL: https://www.postgresql.org

pgEdge: https://www.pgedge.com

--

Anil Sahoo Software Development Engineer II LinkedIn || Blog || GitHub enterprisedb.com

--

Dave Page

pgAdmin: https://www.pgadmin.org

PostgreSQL: https://www.postgresql.org

pgEdge: https://www.pgedge.com