Can I have manual updates with Conveyor?

[MohamedRejeb]

Hi,
I'm looking for something similar to what we have in IntellijIDEA, the user can check for updates, and he can manually download the update when he wants. Can we do something like that with conveyor and Compose?

Thanks!

[mikehearn]

Hi,

Conveyor has all the foundations for that, but at the moment the API needed to trigger manual updates isn't publicly exposed. If you're going to become a commercial user, we can send you the docs needed to use it anyway. We want to make it public soon but have been working on higher priority things. It does work, this is how Conveyor itself is updated, but it needs a bit of polish.

Could you help us understand why you need manually triggered updates? Even with our API, it doesn't offer any UI widgets for this so you'd have to design your own notifications and workflow around it.

[acarlsen]

I would like to control which users get updates based on license, but I don't want another server/service to be dependent on, other than the licensing server.

I just wish for programmatically to disable all auto updating if there is a need to and then I can inform the user about any updates however I deem necessary in the app. Similar to how the Forklift app on Mac does it: allows updates while you have license that allow it, but shows you a warning if you don't (and doesn't allow the update).

Of course there may be some framework limitations that make this hard/impossible, I don't really now much about how the updates process works on the different platforms.

If not possible, then maybe have an option to build an app with auto-updating completely disabled (but the option to trigger an update programmatically when app is open if needed). Don't know if that makes it easier..

[mikehearn]

We can have auto updating be disabled and only let the app trigger it. That's the model Conveyor itself uses.

One minor issue is that on Windows the installer always installs the latest version of the app (the update and install codepaths are the same). So if a user stops paying, stops updating, and then later reinstalls the app on e.g. a new machine, they will get a newer version that they aren't entitled to run. Other than having the app force a downgrade when it first runs, I don't see a good solution to that without update server/license server integration.

[acarlsen]

That model would work for me.

I guess on windows you could direct users with expired licenses to use the zip/msix file if they want to re-install the old version.

[MohamedRejeb]

Any updates on this ?

[mikehearn]

We are making progress on this feature but can't commit to any timeline, sorry.

[mikehearn]

We've just launched Conveyor 15, which adds a new control API! With this you can implement your own update UI. Let us know what you think:

https://conveyor.hydraulic.dev/15.0/release-notes/

[MohamedRejeb]

Great! I will give it a try.