Self-Update Mechanism for Go Commands using GitHub

go-github-selfupdate is a Go library to provide self-update mechanism to command line tools.

Go does not provide the way to install/update the stable version of tools. By default, Go command line tools are updated:

• using go get -u (updating to HEAD)
• using system's package manager (depending on the platform)
• downloading executables from GitHub release page manually

By using this library, you will get 4th choice:

• from your command line tool directly (and automatically)

go-github-selfupdate detects the information of the latest release via GitHub Releases API and check the current version. If newer version than itself is detected, it downloads released binary from GitHub and replaces itself.

• Automatically detects the latest version of released binary on GitHub
• Retrieve the proper binary for the OS and arch where the binary is running
• Update the binary with rollback support on failure
• Tested on Linux, macOS and Windows (using Travis CI and AppVeyor)
• Many archive and compression formats are supported (zip, tar, gzip, xzip)
• Support private repositories
• Support GitHub Enterprise

And small wrapper CLIs are provided:

• detect-latest-release: Detect the latest release of given GitHub repository from command line
• go-get-release: Like go get, but install release binary from GitHub instead

Try Out Example

Example to understand what this library does is prepared as CLI.

Install it at first.

$ go get -u github.com/rhysd/go-github-selfupdate/tree/master/cmd/selfupdate-example

And check the version by -version. -help flag is also available to know all flags.

$ selfupdate-example -version

It should show v1.2.3.

Then run -selfupdate

$ selfupdate-example -selfupdate

It should replace itself and finally shows a message containing release notes.

Please check the binary version is updated to v1.2.4 with -version. The binary is up-to-date. So running -selfupdate again only shows 'Current binary is the latest version'.

Real World Examples

Following tools are using this library.

• dot-github
• dotfiles
• github-clone-all
• pythonbrew
• akashic
• butler

Usage

Code Usage

It provides selfupdate package.

• selfupdate.UpdateSelf(): Detect the latest version of itself and run self update.
• selfupdate.UpdateCommand(): Detect the latest version of given repository and update given command.
• selfupdate.DetectLatest(): Detect the latest version of given repository.
• selfupdate.DetectVersion(): Detect the user defined version of given repository.
• selfupdate.UpdateTo(): Update given command to the binary hosted on given URL.
• selfupdate.Updater: Context manager of self-upadte process. If you want to customize some behavior of self-update (e.g. specify API token, use GitHub Enterprise, ...), please make an instance of Updater and use its methods.

Following is the easiest way to use this package.

import (
    "log"
    "github.com/blang/semver"
    "github.com/rhysd/go-github-selfupdate/selfupdate"
)

const version = "1.2.3"

func doSelfUpdate() {
    v := semver.MustParse(version)
    latest, err := selfupdate.UpdateSelf(v, "myname/myrepo")
    if err != nil {
        log.Println("Binary update failed:", err)
        return
    }
    if latest.Version.Equals(v) {
        // latest version is the same as current version. It means current binary is up to date.
        log.Println("Current binary is the latest version", version)
    } else {
        log.Println("Successfully updated to version", latest.Version)
        log.Println("Release note:\n", latest.ReleaseNotes)
    }
}

Following asks user to update or not.

import (
    "bufio"
    "github.com/blang/semver"
    "github.com/rhysd/go-github-selfupdate/selfupdate"
    "log"
    "os"
)

const version = "1.2.3"

func confirmAndSelfUpdate() {
    latest, found, err := selfupdate.DetectLatest("owner/repo")
    if err != nil {
        log.Println("Error occurred while detecting version:", err)
        return
    }

    v := semver.MustParse(version)
    if !found || latest.Version.Equals(v) {
        log.Println("Current version is the latest")
        return
    }

    fmt.Print("Do you want to update to", latest.Version, "? (y/n): ")
    input, err := bufio.NewReader(os.Stdin).ReadString('\n')
    if err != nil || (input != "y\n" && input != "n\n") {
        log.Println("Invalid input")
        return
    }
    if input == "n\n" {
        return
    }

    if err := selfupdate.UpdateTo(latest.AssetURL, os.Args[0]); err != nil {
        log.Println("Error occurred while updating binary:", err)
        return
    }
    log.Println("Successfully updated to version", latest.Version)
}

If GitHub API token is set to [token] section in gitconfig or $GITHUB_TOKEN environment variable, this library will use it to call GitHub REST API. It's useful when reaching rate limits or when using this library with private repositories.

Please see the documentation page for more detail.

This library should work with GitHub Enterprise. To configure API base URL, please setup Updater instance and use its method instead (Actually all functions above are just a shortcuts of methods of Updater instance).

Following is an example of usage with GitHub Enterprise.

import (
    "log"
    "github.com/blang/semver"
    "github.com/rhysd/go-github-selfupdate/selfupdate"
)

const version = "1.2.3"

func doSelfUpdate(token string) {
    v := semver.MustParse(version)
    up, err := selfupdate.NewUpdater(selfupdate.Config{
        APIToken: token,
        EnterpriseBaseURL: "https://github.your.company.com/api/v3",
    })
    latest, err := up.UpdateSelf(v, "myname/myrepo")
    if err != nil {
        log.Println("Binary update failed:", err)
        return
    }
    if latest.Version.Equals(v) {
        // latest version is the same as current version. It means current binary is up to date.
        log.Println("Current binary is the latest version", version)
    } else {
        log.Println("Successfully updated to version", latest.Version)
        log.Println("Release note:\n", latest.ReleaseNotes)
    }
}

If APIToken field is not given, it tries to retrieve API token from [token] section of .gitconfig or $GITHUB_TOKEN environment variable. If no token is found, it raises an error because GitHub Enterprise API does not work without authentication.

If your GitHub Enterprise instance's upload URL is different from the base URL, please also set EnterpriseUploadURL field

Naming Rules of Released Binaries

go-github-selfupdate assumes that released binaries are put for each combination of platforms and archs. Binaries for each platform can be easily built using tools like gox

You need to put the binaries with the following format.

{cmd}_{goos}_{goarch}{.ext}

{cmd} is a name of command. {goos} and {goarch} are the platform and the arch type of the binary. {.ext} is a file extension. go-github-selfupdate supports .zip, .gzip, .tar.gz and .tar.xz. You can also use blank and it means binary is not compressed.

If you compress binary, uncompressed directory or file must contain the executable named {cmd}.

And you can also use - for separator instead of _ if you like.

For example, if your command name is foo-bar, one of followings is expected to be put in release page on GitHub as binary for platform linux and arch amd64.

• foo-bar_linux_amd64 (executable)
• foo-bar_linux_amd64.zip (zip file containing foo-bar)
• foo-bar_linux_amd64.tar.gz (tar file containing foo-bar)
• foo-bar_linux_amd64.xz (xzip file of the executable foo-bar)
• foo-bar-linux-amd64.tar.gz (- is also ok for separator)

To archive the executable directly on Windows, .exe can be added before file extension like foo-bar_windows_amd64.exe.zip.

Naming Rules of Versions (=Git Tags)

go-github-selfupdate searches binaries' versions via Git tag names (not a release title). When your tool's version is 1.2.3, you should use the version number for tag of the Git repository (i.e. 1.2.3 or v1.2.3).

This library assumes you adopt semantic versioning. It is necessary for comparing versions systematically.

Prefix before version number \d+\.\d+\.\d+ is automatically omitted. For example, ver1.2.3 or release-1.2.3 are also ok.

Tags which don't contain a version number are ignored (i.e. nightly). And releases marked as pre-release are also ignored.

Structure of Releases

In summary, structure of releases on GitHub looks like:

• v1.2.0
  • foo-bar-linux-amd64.tar.gz
  • foo-bar-linux-386.tar.gz
  • foo-bar-darwin-amd64.tar.gz
  • foo-bar-windows-amd64.zip
  • ... (Other binaries for v1.2.0)
• v1.1.3
  • foo-bar-linux-amd64.tar.gz
  • foo-bar-linux-386.tar.gz
  • foo-bar-darwin-amd64.tar.gz
  • foo-bar-windows-amd64.zip
  • ... (Other binaries for v1.1.3)
• ... (older versions)

Tags which don't contain a version number are ignored (i.e. nightly). And releases marked as pre-release are also ignored.

Development

Running tests

All library sources are put in /selfupdate directory. So you can run tests as following at the top of the repository:

$ go test -v ./selfupdate

Some tests are not run without setting a GitHub API token because they call GitHub API too many times. To run them, please generate an API token and set it to an environment variable.

$ export GITHUB_TOKEN="{token generated by you}"
$ go test -v ./selfupdate

Above command run almost all tests and it's enough to check the behavior before creating a pull request. Some tests are still not tested because they depend on my personal API access token, though; for repositories on GitHub Enterprise or private repositories on GitHub.

Debugging

This library can output logs for debugging. By default, logger is disabled. You can enable the logger by following and can know the details of the self update.

selfupdate.EnableLog()

CI

Tests run on CIs (Travis CI, Appveyor) are run with the token I generated. However, because of security reason, it is not used for the tests for pull requests. In the tests, a GitHub API token is not set and API rate limit is often exceeding. So please ignore the test failures on creating a pull request.

Dependencies

This library utilizes go-github to retrieve the information of releases and go-update to replace current binary and semver to compare versions.

Copyright (c) 2013 The go-github AUTHORS. All rights reserved.

Copyright 2015 Alan Shreve

Copyright (c) 2014 Benedikt Lang

What is different from tj/go-update?

This library goal is the same as tj/go-update, but it's different in following points.

tj/go-update:

• does not support Windows
• only allows v for version prefix
• does not ignore pre-release
• has only a few tests
• supports Apex store for putting releases

License

Distributed under the MIT License