Bump is an automated pipeline for releasing apps with Sparkle

Features:

• 🚀 Get an end-to-end Sparkle release pipeline running in 60 seconds
• ✍️ Create & maintain a Sparkle changelog from a single markdown file
• 🔐 Automatic Sparkle certificate and signature handling
• 📦 Automatic release versioning in your changelog and on S3
• 🔑 Bring your own AWS account
• 🚐 Can be self-hosted

Ready to try it? Get started.

Please note;

• Bump has not been tested with the Sparkle 2 Beta. In theory it should be perfectly compatible but it has only been tested with Sparkle 1.x
• You'll need an AWS access key and secret key to use Bump as it automatically manages an S3 bucket for your Sparkle changelog file and app archives
• Bump has only been tested with macOS Sparkle releases, not Sparkle-compatible distributions available for other platforms
• Bump doesn't support Delta updates with Sparkle (yet!)

Contents

• Contents
• Getting started
  • 1. Create a new repo using this template
  • 2. Update variables
  • 3. Create secrets
  • 4. Creating a release
• Appendix
  • S3 Information
  • App archive support
  • Release frontmatter
  • Running locally / self-hosted
  • API Support
  • Updating from a previous version of Bump

Getting started

1. Create a new repo using this template

Create a new repo using this template. This will copy the entire directory structure into your own GitHub account.

2. Update variables

Edit config.yml and replace the default values;

app_name: AppExample 
app_filename: AppExample.zip
s3_bucket_name: app-example-distribution

3. Create secrets

In the Settings of your repo, create the following secrets;

4. Creating a release

1. Place your notarised, zipped app in the ./release/ folder. The name of the zip should match the app_filename you have set in config.yml. Ensure you delete any other .zip that exists in this directory.
2. Edit ./release/latest.md to reflect this new release. You will want to change the version number and probably add a description. View the list of Sparkle attributes you can set in this file
3. Create a pull request into the main or master branch (Bump supports both) of your repository.

Upon opening a pull request, Bump will create and commit a new changelog.xml into your branch not release anything publicly.

Upon merging to main/master, Bump will push your new changelog.xml and app release to your S3 bucket, making it publicly available to your customers.

Find the link to your publicly hosted changelog.xml from Actions → Latest run → Build and expand the "Apply Terraform plan" panel to see the output. It will be in the format https://{{bucketName}}.s3.amazonaws.com/changelog.xml

Appendix

S3 Information

By default, Bump will use aws region us-east-1. You can override this by changing the Terraform plan at .bump/main.tf.

App archive support

Bump supports serving the following app archive types;

• .zip
• .dmg
• .tar.gz

Release frontmatter

The following keys can be used in the ./release/lastest.md frontmatter;

Running locally / self-hosted

Bump has been crafted to work with GitHub Actions but can also be run locally. Some things to note;

• Expose the required secrets as environment variables
• Bump Core, the binary distributed as part of Bump which is responsible for generating changelog.xml, is contained in a seperate repo
• Run the Bump Core CLI from the root of the project (e.g. ./.bump/bin/bump).
• You can use Act to emulate GitHub Actions on any platform

API Support

Bump generates a JSON version of the changelog so that you can easily consume the changelog in a web app. To use it, find your changelog URL and replace the extension with .json

e.g. https://your-bucket-url.s3.amazonaws.com/changelog.xml → https://your-bucket-url.s3.amazonaws.com/changelog.json

Note: the default setting for CORS access is to allow all origins. To change this edit the cors stanza in the Terraform script at ./bump/main.tf

Updating from a previous version of Bump

Updating Bump is easy. Simply copy the .bump folder from this repository to your own.