Option to enable pre-releases in the preferences

[agajdosi]

It would be great if the updater had an option to enable prereleases for users who want to try the latest version of the add-on and are willing to test and risk a little bit. It would help the add-on developers to follow the RERO philosophy: Release early, release often.

I have implemented this for BlenderKit add-on where we wanted to improve the quality of the add-on and make it as easy as possible for the users to update to alpha, beta releases. TBH it works quite nice and I am happy with that - from 160k downloads on normal release we have 1k downloads on alphas. This base of users who helps us by using the prereleases is great.

How it could work is:

• currently in the updater you can define strings which if contained in the branch/release/tag means this release is ignored
• the prereleases update give option to users to easily ignore this check, so they can update do prereleases

I would like to create a PR from the edits as I believe it could be useful for other add-on creators and users. Please let me know if this is something which seems good to you.

[schroef]

That should be doable, i remember i added the option to add releases. If that is enabled in the addon you can actually pick a release yourself. I think it can actually do what you want. See this link; https://github.com/CGCookie/blender-addon-updater/issues/24#issuecomment-377286872

It looks like this in the addon

You need to enable this in the addon part if you want to add it

[schroef]

This is the actuall pull from 2018 where i added the functionality

https://github.com/CGCookie/blender-addon-updater/pull/38

[TheDuckCow]

I'm going to close this as the suggestions by @schroef are on the right track, and any such implementation will be quite specific to naming conventions/flows that a given addon developer would want. If there's still questions, just chime back in on this thread!