I have an application, an aspnet core website 3.0 that is currently running in a console application.
A client is interested in installing it on their internal network.
I am thinking that its best to convert it to a background service and windows can ensure that its running. Following: https://dotnetcoretutorials.com/2019/12/07/creating-windows-services-in-net-core-part-3-the-net-core-worker-way/
What are my options to create an installer for this? Is there anything new out of the box with dotnet core that makes this easy, or should I just go with older "best practice" aka google it to create an installer? Or is it best to just use that sc create TestService BinPath=C:\full\path\to\publish\dir\WindowsServiceExample.exe command to install it.
Author of the blog post here. It really depends on who the target audience is. If it's someone trying to deploy it on an internal network, IMO the SC commands are fine because either
A. It's an IT person installing it anyway so they won't have fear of double clicking a .bat file.
B. The IT team uses some sort of GPO/scripting to keep all machines in line in which case they can surely run a one line command to install it anyway.
An installer is only useful if the end user is non-IT, a customer etc.
Many applications have this functionality now, but a good example is the Spotify client.
The app discovers there is a new version available, downloads it in the background then prompts the user to restart to get the new version. When the user quits the new version is installed (or the installed version is patched) then the application is restarted, all without further user interaction. In fact, the user really doesn't even have to do anything the app would automatically update on every exit if the user was never notified.
We have a cross-platform Qt 5.3 application and our lean startup business model requires us to push application updates very often so I'd really like to find a method that works cross platform with as little platform specific code as possible.
There are multiple parts to this question.
Noticing the update, and downloading the installer. (Obvious, and not a problem)
Running the installer application. Not an issue except how does one gain privilege? Spotify never asks for privilage to install again after the first install.
Avoiding "This application has been downloaded from the Internet" approval dialogue on every update.
Restarting the application after upgrading, but only when the user responded to the quit and upgrade prompt.
Specifically are there any tools, installers or code examples that do this?
You can follow how Google Chrome and Opera (latest one, not version <= 12) do it, rougly as below:
When installing the application, create a scheduled task that runs an updater as administrator (or a user with permission to write files to your application directory) periodically. For example in Windows, you can find GoogleUpdateTaskMachineCore and GoogleUpdateTaskMachineUA entries in Task Scheduler.
Your application structure looks something like the following (Google Chrome has similar structure in C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application):
C:\Program Files\AwesomeApp\launcher.exe
C:\Program Files\AwesomeApp\1.0\AwesomeApp.exe ; version 1.0 of application
C:\Program Files\AwesomeApp\1.2\AwesomeApp.exe ; version 1.2 of application
The application shortcut created by installer will run launcher.exe. This launcher.exe will run the latest version of AwesomeApp.exe available in the directory. For example in the above structure, launcher.exe will run AwesomeApp\1.2\AwesomeApp.exe.
When the updater finds an update, it will download it and add the new version to the directory in the background. After that it will tell the running application (if it is running) to notify the user that an update is ready and can be used by restarting the application. And of course your older application needs to close itself and restart by running launcher.exe too. This updater may delete old application versions and keep only the latest two versions.
Is there anyway to disable the TideSDK installer dialog popup when first opening your app. I am submitting an app to a 3rd party distribution site and it was rejected because of this.
Please help?
You could use tidebuilder.py and pass the -n parameter to it. The final command would be:
./tidebuilder.py -n -d {output dir} {source project dir}
If you create the application in bundled mode. There would not be any installer dialog popping up while installing the application. It is likely that you have created a networked installer and while installing and running first time its trying to fetch the modules from internet by popping up the installer dialog.
Can you provide some more details about your application, modules used by the same, are u creating net installer or bundled, which platform you are on ?
Also if possible describe the commands which you are using to create the application. This would be helpful for further investigating the issue.
I am a novice when it comes to apps but i have managed to write one, test it, debug it, install it onto my Iphone. I'm now on the final step upload it through application loader...
my problem is i can't get application loader to install. i have downloaded it, run the .dmg, this creates a new device on my system with the file applicationloader.pkg. I run this and it runs me through the installation, i have entered my admin authority, it says installation complete.
But it doesn't have the program anywhere. i have looked in Applications, searched in the finder and i can not locate where the application loader is.
1 - is there a reason why it wouldn't be installing properly?
2 - is there a way to download a previous version (current is 2.7) to try that
3 - is there a way of uploading without the application loader?
If you have the latest Xcode installed on your machine, go to the Xcode menu item/Developer Tools and open the Application Loader. If you are working with Xcode there is no need to use the application loader though. Every step you need to bring your app into iTunes connect can be done via Xcode. The steps are Archive (for Release), select the archive - validate it (you mast have prepared your app in iTunes Connect (must be in the status ready for upload) and the submit it to the store.
I love applications that are able to update themselves without any effort from the user (think: Sparkle framework for Mac). Is there any code/library I can leverage to do this in a Qt application, without having to worry about the OS details?
At least for Windows, Mac and user-owned Linux binaries.
I could integrate Sparkle on the Mac version, code something for the Linux case (only for a standalone, user-owned binary; I won't mess with distribution packaging, if my program is ever packaged), and find someone to help me on the Windows side, but that's horribly painful.
It is not a complete solution, but a cross-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux) tool for creating packages for auto-updates and installing them is available at https://github.com/mendeley/Update-Installer. This tool does not deal with publishing updates or downloading them.
This was written for use with a Qt-based application but to make the update installer small, standalone and easy to build, the installer uses only standard system libraries (C++ runtime, pthreads/libz/libbz2 on Linux/Mac, Win32 API on Windows, Cocoa on Mac, GTK with fallback on Linux). This simplifies delivering updates which include new versions of Qt and other non-system libraries that your application may depend on.
Before considering this though, I would suggest:
If you are only building for two platforms, consider using standard and well-tested auto-update frameworks for those platforms - eg. Sparkle on Mac, Google's Omaha on Windows or auto-update systems built into popular install frameworks (eg. InstallShield). I haven't tried BitRock.
On Mac, the Mac App Store may be a good option. See https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-16549 though.
On Linux, consider creating a .deb package and a simple repository to host it. Once users have a repository set up, the system-wide software update tools will take care of checking for and installing new releases. The steps for setting up a new repository however are too complex for many new Ubuntu/Debian users. What we did, and also what Dropbox and Google have done, is to create a .deb package which sets up the repository as part of the package installation.
A few other notes on creating an updater:
On Windows Vista/7, if the application is installed system-wide (eg. in C:\Program Files\$APPNAME) your users will see a scary UAC prompt when the updater tries to obtain permissions to write to the install directory. This can be avoided either by installing to a user-writable directory (I gather that this is what Google Chrome does) or by obtaining an Authenticode certificate and using it to sign the updater binary.
On Windows Vista/7, an application .exe or DLL cannot be deleted if in use, but the updater can move the existing .exe/DLL out of the way into a temporary directory and schedule it for deletion on the next reboot.
On Ubuntu, 3rd-party repositories are disabled after distribution updates. Google works around this by creating a cron-job to re-add the repository if necessary.
Shameless plug: Fervor, a simple multiplatform (Qt-based) application autoupdater inspired by Sparkle.
Shameless plug: this a relatively old question, but I thought that it may be useful to mention a library that I created recently, which I named "QSimpleUpdater". Aside from notifying you if there's a newer version, it allows you to download the change log in any format (such as HTML or RTF) and download the updates directly from your application using a dialog.
As you may expect from a Qt project, it works on any platform supported by Qt (tested on Windows, Mac & Linux).
Links:
Website
GitHub repository
Screenshot:
Though it works a bit differently than Sparkle, BitRock InstallBuilder contains an autoupdater written in Qt that can be used independently (disclaimer, I am the original BitRock developer). It is a commercial app, but we have free licenses for open source projects.
I've developed an auto-updater library which works beautifully on Mac OS X, Linux and pretty much every Unix that allows you to unlink a file while the file is still open. The reason being that I simply extracted the downloaded package on top of the existing application. Unfortunately, because I relied on this functionality, I ran into problems on Windows as Windows does not let you unlink an open file.
The only alternative I could find is to use MoveFileEx with the replace on reboot flag, but that is awful.
However, renaming the working directory of the application works on Windows 7 and Windows XP. I haven't tried Windows Vista yet.
I have found WebUpdate to be quite useful, though it's written with the wxWidgets. But don't worry, it's a separate app which handles your updates. The steps to integrate it are pretty simple - just write two XML files and run the updater. And yes, it's cross-platform.
The advantage of it is it will automatically download and unzip/install all you required and not just provide a popup with a notification about a new version and a link to download it. Another thing you can do with it is customizable actions.
Project's main page is here, you can read the docs or take a look at the official tutorial.
The blog post Mixing Cocoa and Qt may solve the problem for the Mac platform.
You can use UpdateNode which gives you all the possibilities to update your software. It's using a cross platform Qt client and is free for Open Source!
UPDATE
Just did some further analysis on that and really like this solution:
Pros:
Free for Open Source!!! Even the client is Open Source: https://github.com/updatenode/unclient
The client is already localized in several languages
Very flexible in terms of updates. You can even update single non-binaries.
Provides additionally a way to display messages though the client.
Ready to use binaries & installer for all common Linux distributions, single Windows binary, as well as installer and a solution for Mac (which I have not tried, as I don't have a Mac)
Easy to use web service, nice statistics and update check is integrated within few minutes
Cons:
I am missing a multi-user management in the online service. Maybe they will do it in future - I will definitely suggest that in their feedback portal
The client is a GUI client only - so, you will need to shrink it down to run without a GUI frontend (maybe only necessary for people like me ;-) )
So, bottom line, as this solution is quite new, I think there is lot of potential here. I will definitely use it in my project and I am looking forward for more from them! Thumbs up!
This is an old question but there is not Squirrel in answers which is BEST SOLUTION , here is what I'm doing in qt 5.12.4 with qt quick "my qml app" you can do this in any other language
I'm doing this in windows there is mac version of squirrel too, I don't know about Linux
download nuget package explorer release
https://github.com/NuGetPackageExplorer/NuGetPackageExplorer/releases
open nuget package explorer and add this directory 'lib/net45' it doesn't matter you have a .net app or not, I did this for my qt application otherwise it won't work.
add all files into this folder specify your version in the metadata
save nupkg file
download squirrel release https://github.com/Squirrel/Squirrel.Windows/releases
add squirrel to windows environment path
open cmd and cd to directory of nupkg file
squirrel --releasify file_name.nupkg -> now inide releases folder, there should be setup.exe file which will install app and other files.
to create new version do 2,3,4,7,8 again if its an update it will create delta file which is only needed file to update, put this files into your service directory for example in updates folder of your website which you need to disable directory browsing in IIS , and to auto-update application you need to call Update.exe which is in parent folder of application root directory appdir/../update.exe --update http://yourserver.com/upates/ after application restart app should start with new version
you can find documentation for squirrel in https://github.com/Squirrel/Squirrel.Windows/blob/develop/docs/getting-started/0-overview.md and nuget package explorer here https://github.com/NuGetPackageExplorer/NuGetPackageExplorer and you can use only nuget.exe too if you don't want to use nuget package explorer which can be used for dynamic generation of versions, which can be download from https://www.nuget.org/downloads
That easy. Now you have auto-update app which will download updates from the server and auto-update app. For more info you can read documentations.
note: for iis uses https://github.com/Squirrel/OldSquirrelForWindows/issues/205
I suggest you read on plugin and how to create and use them. If your application architecture is modular and be split into different plugins. Take a look at Google Auto Update utility http://code.google.com/p/omaha/. We use this.
Thibault Cuvelier is writing a tutorial (in French) to develop an updater. I know the explanations are in French (and everyone is not understanding French), but I think this can be readable with a web translator like Google Translate. With this you will have a cross-platform updater, but you need to write it by yourself.
For what I know, the only part of the updater that is explained in the tutorial, is the file downloading part. In the case this can help you, refer to the tutorial, Un updater avec Qt.
I hope that helps.
OK, so I guess I take it as a "no (cross-platform) way". It's too bad!
I have found a solution that can be automated with built-in self-extracting patches and updates. for windows. I have started using their sdk. take a look at the massive documentation here, https://agersoftware.com/docs/ the sdk is called securesdk and comes with their app, SecureDelta sdk. does a great job on any kind of files, better results than lzma-included delta updaters