electron-updater-example

This repo contains the bare minimum code to have an auto-updating Electron app using electron-updater with releases stored on GitHub.

NOTE: If you want to run through this whole process, you will need to fork this repo on GitHub and replace all instances of iffy with your GitHub username before doing the following steps.

1. For macOS, you will need a code-signing certificate.

   Install Xcode (from the App Store), then follow these instructions to make sure you have a "Mac Developer" certificate. If you'd like to export the certificate (for automated building, for instance) you can. You would then follow these instructions.

2. Adjust package.json if needed.

   By default, electron-updater will try to detect the GitHub settings (such as the repo name and owner) from reading the .git/config or from reading other attributes within package.json. If the auto-detected settings are not what you want, configure the publish property as follows:

    {
        ...
        "build": {
            "publish": [{
                "provider": "github",
                "owner": "iffy",
                "repo": "electron-updater-example"
            }],
            ...
        }
    }
   

3. Install necessary dependencies with:

    yarn
   

   or

    npm install
   

4. Generate a GitHub access token by going to https://github.com/settings/tokens/new. The access token should have the repo scope/permission. Once you have the token, assign it to an environment variable (on macOS/linux):

    export GH_TOKEN="<YOUR_TOKEN_HERE>"
   

5. Publish with the publish.sh script:

    ./publish.sh
   

6. Release the release on GitHub by going to https://github.com/iffy/electron-updater-example/releases, editing the release and clicking "Publish release."

7. Download and install the app from https://github.com/iffy/electron-updater-example/releases.

8. Update the version in package.json, commit and push to GitHub.

9. Do steps 5 and 6 again.

10. Open the installed version of the app and see that it updates itself.