This utility provides an alternative to the Twitch/Curse client for management and updating of addons for World of Warcraft. The Twitch/Curse client is rather bloated and buggy, and comes with many features that most users will not ever use in the first place. This utility, however, is lightweight and makes it very easy to manage which addons are being updated, and to update them just by running a python script.
Changelog located in changelog.txt
This utility has two dependencies:
Thanks to https://github.com/Saritus, the requests module is now included in the download as a package, so there is no longer any need to install those yourself. Just install Python 3, download this app, configure the utility, and double click "WoWAddonUpdater.py" to start.
The "config.ini" file is used by the utility to find where to install the addons to, and where to get the list of mods from.
The default location to install the addons to is "C:\Program Files (x86)\World of Warcraft\Interface\AddOns". If this is not the location where you have World of Warcraft installed, you will need to edit "config.ini" to point to your addons folder.
The default location of the addon list file is simply "in.txt", but this file will not exist on your PC, so you should either create "in.txt" in the same location as the utility, or name the file something else and edit "config.ini" to point to the new file.
The "config.ini" file also has two other properties that you may not need to change. "Installed Versions File" determines where to store the file that keeps track of the current versions of your addons, and I don't recommend changing that.
The "Close Automatically When Completed" property determines whether the window automatically closes when the process completes (both successfully and unsuccessfully). It defaults to "False" so that you can see if any errors occurred. If you run this utility as a scheduled job (e.g. upon startup, every x hours, etc), we recommend changing this to "True".
Whatever file you use for your list of mods needs to be formatted in a particular way. Each line corresponds to a mod, and the line just needs to contain the link to the Curse or WoWInterface page for the mod. For example:
https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/world-quest-tracker
https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/deadly-boss-mods
https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/auctionator
http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info24005-RavenousMounts.html
Each link needs to be the main page for the addon, as shown above.
If you want to extract a subfolder from the default downloaded folder (typically needed with Tukui addons), add a pipe character (|) and the name of the subfolder at the end of the line. For example, the ElvUI addon can be added as follows:
https://git.tukui.org/elvui/elvui|ElvUI
because the downloadable zip from this website contains a subfolder called "ElvUI" containing the actual mod.
The standard addon location on macOS is /Applications/World of Warcraft/Interface/AddOns
Note: To save to a .txt file in TextEdit, go to Preferences > "New Document" tab > Under the "Format" section, choose "Plain Text".
After configuring the utility and setting up your input file, updating your addons is as simple as double clicking the "WoWAddonUpdater.py" file.
Note: The more addons you have in your list, the longer it will take to update them... Duh.
Have any questions, concerns, issues, or suggestions for the utility? Feel free to either submit an issue through Github or email me at kuhnerdm@gmail.com. Please put in the subject line that this is for the WoW Addon Updater.
Make a video guide detailing all the above information
Update to use a visual interface instead of a command-line interface
Add version checking to eliminate reinstalls of the current versions of addons Thanks to https://github.com/zurohki for the code to implement this, and to https://github.com/Saritus for integrating it into the current codebase! You will now see reduced data usage of the app, and quicker update times!
Make the code structure not suck. No, seriously... it's bad... Thanks to https://github.com/Saritus for the refactoring!
Add support for more addon providers (namely WoWInterface) Thanks to https://github.com/Saritus for the WoWInterface support!
Thanks for checking this out; hopefully it helps a lot of you :)