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 specific 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

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

• from your command line tool directly

go-github-selfupdate retrieves the information of released binaries via GitHub Releases API and check the current version. If newer version than itself is detected, it updates binary by downloading from GitHub and replacing itself.

Please note that this library assumes you adopt semantic versioning. It is necessary for comparing versions systematically.

Usage

Code

It provides selfupdate package.

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

func doUpdate(version string) {
    up, err := selfupdate.TryUpdate(version, "myname/myrepo", nil)
    if err != nil {
        log.Println("Binary update failed", err)
        return
    }
    if up.Version == version {
        log.Println("Current binary is the latest version", version)
    } else {
        log.Println("Update successfully done to version", up.Version)
    }
}

• selfupdate.TryUpdate()
• selfupdate.TryUpdateTo()
• selfupdate.DetectLatest()

Please see the documentation page for more detail.

Naming Rules of Released Binaries

go-github-selfupdate assumes that released binaries are put for each combination of platforms and archs.

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)
• foo-bar-linux-amd64.tar.gz (gzip file)
• foo-bar_linux_amd64 (executable)
• foo-bar_linux_amd64.zip (zip file)
• foo-bar_linux_amd64.tar.gz (gzip file)

Naming Rules of Git Tags

go-github-selfupdate searches binaries' versions via corresponding Git tag names. When your binary's version is 1.2.3, you should use 1.2.3 or v1.2.3 (prefixed with v) as Git tag name.

Structure of Releases

In summary, structure of releases on GitHub looks like:

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

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