Today, Electron is widely used to create desktop applications easily and quickly. Developers who have spent many hours coding front-end web applications can now take their knowledge in Javascript and bring their apps to a user’s desktop.

While you only need to re-deploy to ship your modifications in web apps, in desktop applications you need an update routine. Updates are crucial for your user experience. Updates can fix bugs, add features, and even patch an important security breach. That’s why the update experience needs to be really smooth for the user and not something that they will download “later”.

Today, you can either find an auto-update server that will do exactly that or you can code your own. However, these open source projects are not always maintained and you still need to deploy your own server. We believe that developers should only focus on their product and that’s why we created a service that you can use directly without thinking about all of this. While it is framework agnostic we’ve build it so it can perfectly integrate your Electron application. In this article, we will explain how easily you can start using Update Rocks!

Update routine explained

Update routine schema

Update Rocks! connects to your Github repositories and fetches the latest release every time Github send a notification. Your application can now query Update Rocks! server to check if something new has been released.

If the application is notified that there is a new release ready for download, it will fetch it directly in Github. We also support private repositories; in this case our server will be a proxy and will redirect the request to Github.

Today we only support Github, but we are actively working on support for Bitbucket and Gitlab.