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Download pages

The site task will generate the online update repository along with a simple static download page for your software. The download page is entirely optional and can just be ignored if you don't want it. It has these features:

  • Detects the user's operating system. Allows the user to switch between operating systems.
  • On Chrome, detects the CPU architecture.
  • Access to both primary package formats for each platform, and alternatives like raw zips or tarballs.
  • Provides copy/pasteable terminal commands to install the app on Linux.
  • Shows your app logo.

Download page screenshot

Synopsis

app.site {
  display-name = Title of the web page.

    # Where the installed packages can check for online updates.
  base-url = somesite.com/downloads

  # Import an HTML template or additional files to the generated site.
  inputs += "my-template-dir/*" -> .

  # Change the set of images used for the logo, as found in the resolved inputs.
  icons = "my-icons-*.png"

  # Which keys appear in the metadata.properties file in the generated site.
  export-keys = [ app.version, app.revision ]

  # HTML to add into the <head> area.
  extra-header-html = """
    <script>
        // etc
    </script>
  """
}

Icon

The app.site.icons key works the same way as the other icon keys do (in the windows, mac and linux sections respectively). The default app.site.inputs list contains the value of ${app.site.icons} so you can use alternative file names by just setting the image name here. However, if you have a file named icon.svg as an input, it'll be used as the icon instead of the rendered files.

Here's an example of how to import icons from a different directory than the one containing the config and use it at the top of the generated HTML.

app.site {
  base-url = downloads.hydraulic.dev/${channel}/compose-sample
  icons = "../../packaging/images/icon-{32,64,128,256}.png"
}

Publishing through GitHub

Conveyor's repository sites are designed to be compatible with GitHub releases. Using them is easy:

  1. Set your app.site.base-url config key to be github.com/$user/$repo/releases/latest/download
  2. Run conveyor make site as usual to get an output directory.
  3. Create a new release and upload the contents of the output directory, minus download.html and any extra files you used, like icon files. Take a look at this example release to see what you should have.
  4. Take the generated download.html file and stick it on your website somewhere.

That's it! To upgrade your users just create a new GitHub release as normal. The auto-update engines will be checking the metadata files on whatever your latest release is to discover what to download.

Be aware of these caveats:

  • Your users will upgrade to whatever the /releases/latest URL points to. Therefore, you shouldn't do beta releases or other forms of pre-release this way. Stick those files somewhere else or use draft releases, etc.
  • The download.html file contains links to the "latest" files but their file names will contain the version number. Therefore you should copy the HTML to your website each time you do a release, otherwise users will get 404 errors.

Future versions of Conveyor might automate the process of doing the uploads to GitHub.