A free service that makes it easy for open-source Electron apps to update themselves.

Before using this service, make sure your Electron app meets these criteria:

• Your app runs on macOS or Windows
• Your app has a public GitHub repository
• Your builds are published to GitHub Releases
• Your builds are code signed

Install update-electron-app as a runtime dependency (not a devDependency):

npm install update-electron-app --save

Call it from in you main process file:

require('update-electron-app')()

And that's all it takes! To customize, see the update-electron-app API.

Once your application is packaged, it will update itself for each new GitHub Release that you publish.

Use something like the following setup to add automatic updates to your application:

Important: Please ensure that the code below will only be executed in your packaged app, and not in development. You can use electron-is-dev to check for the environment.

const { app, autoUpdater } = require('electron')

Next, construct the URL of the update server and tell autoUpdater about it:

const server = 'https://update.electronjs.org'
const feed = `${server}/OWNER/REPO/${process.platform}-${process.arch}/${app.getVersion()}`

autoUpdater.setFeedURL(feed)

As the final step, check for updates. The example below will check every 10 minutes:

setInterval(() => {
  autoUpdater.checkForUpdates()
}, 10 * 60 * 1000)

Once your application is packaged, it will update itself for each new GitHub Release that you publish.

$ npm install
$ redis-server
$ GH_TOKEN=TOKEN npm start

To try with an actual electron app, run:

$ npm start &
$ cd example
$ npm install

On Darwin:

$ npm run build
$ ./out/test-darwin-x64/test.app/Contents/MacOS/test

On Windows:

$ npm run build
$ "example\out\make\squirrel.windows\x64\test-0.0.0 Setup.exe"