Update Deploy Qt

Before thinking about using this please remember that this software is still in pre-alpha stage and everything this does is very experimental and unstable which may even crash your application at times. This project may even be deleted without any notice. -- Antony Jr.

updatedeployqt is a command line tool which can deploy auto update feature or integrate the updater into your QApplication with zero code change. This does not depend on the programming language you used to build the Application , as long as it uses Qt framework , this feature can be deployed using this tool.

IMPORTANT: This software is in alpha stage. Remember with great power comes great responsibility.

Features

Deploy Native Auto Updater with zero code change - This done using Qt Plugin Injector.
Programming Language Independent - The reason you want to use this solution.
Supports AppImages , Qt Installer Framework and Applications released through Github.
Light-weight - Using this only takes about 800 KiB.
Cross-platform - Yet to implement but its going to be.
Respects General Data Protection Regulation - unlike electron-updater.
Drink the Qt Kool-aid - In a positive way.

Installation

Linux

You don't need to compile this from source , simply download the latest AppImage from releases and make it executable and you are ready to go. This works in travis-ci and other such services too. So you can deploy update directly on continuous integration services.

You can download the latest AppImage from this url. This url will be constant and will never change and thus you can use this url to download the AppImage using wget whenever you want to use it.

 $ wget -O updatedeployqt-x86_64.AppImage "https://git.io/fj4CH"
 $ chmod +x updatedeployqt-x86_64.AppImage
 $ ./updatedeployqt-x86_64.AppImage

Windows

Not yet implemented

MacOSX

Not yet implemented

Usage

The program looks for updatedeployqt.json in the current working directory or in the path given through -c,--config argument. This configuration file can be interactively generated by passing -g,--generate-config argument to the program.

This configuration file will decide on how the updater should work , such as auto update without the users concern or integrate the updater into a menu bar item.

After generating the configuration file , you can simply run the below command to deploy your updater.

 $ updatedeployqt [PATH TO DEPLOY DIRECTORY]

or if updatedeployqt.json is not in the current working directory.

 $ updatedeployqt -c[PATH TO CONFIG FILE] [PATH TO DEPLOY DIRECTORY]

The deploy directory is a directory which you have finalized and packaged all required libraries and plugins along with your executable and resources. In case you are packaging AppImages then the deploy directory is your AppDir.

Projects Using This

Feel free to open a PR to include your project too. Here are some known projects which use this to deploy auto update feature for their Qt application.

Blue Glow - You can use this as an example.
QTalarm-AppImage - You can also use this as an example.

License

BSD 3-Clause License

antony-jr / updatedeployqt

readme