Download/update site¶

The site task will generate the online update repository along with a static download page. The copied-site task will additionally copy the results to another directory, which can be on a remote system accessible via SFTP.

The download page is 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.

See an example

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>
  """

  # Directory to upload/copy the site to over SFTP.
  copy-to = "//user@myserver.com/var/www/downloads"

  # If set, controls whether the Debian packages and apt files go into a 
  # subdirectory or not. If not set this is inferred automatically.
  # You should normally never need to set this. 
  flat = true/false
}

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 use an SVG file 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"
}

Exporting to metadata.properties¶

When you generate a download/update site with conveyor make site one of the generated files is called metadata.properties. It's a text file containing key=value pairs and by default will look like this:

#Sun Dec 04 18:41:57 CET 2022
app.long-fsname=vendor-name-product-name
app.revision=0
app.windows.manifests.version-quad=2.1.0.0
app.version=2.1

The keys to export are controlled by the app.site.export-keys key and the default value is:

export-keys = [app.long-fsname, app.version, app.revision, app.windows.manifests.version-quad]

You can export any key that maps to a string, number or boolean. Objects and lists can't be exported. Here's an example of exporting a multi-line string:

release-notes = """
    New feature: We've integrated AI and blockchain to make your work really fizz!
    Also - bug fixes.
"""
app.site.export-keys += release-notes

The resulting metadata.properties file will have a key that looks like this:

release-note=New feature: We've integrated AI and blockchain to make your work really fizz!\nAlso - bug fixes.\n

Notice that the newline characters are escaped and the indent/leading whitespace were stripped.

Publishing through GitHub¶

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

Set your app.vcs-url to point to https://github.com/user/repo. This will automatically set app.site.base-url to be github.com/$user/$repo/releases/latest/download. If you aren't packaging an open source app then don't set vcs-url and set the site.base-url key to that location manually.
Run conveyor make site as usual to get an output directory.
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.
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.

Publishing via SFTP¶

If you set app.site.copy-to to a string like //hostname/directory then you can use the copied-site task to both build the downloads and upload the resulting download site to a remote server. The directory should be absolute, and you can specify both username and password in the machine part (it's basically an ssh:// url but minus the scheme). Public/private keys and the known_hosts file will be read from the usual locations as used by OpenSSH, but Conveyor won't log in to a server it doesn't recognize, so if you would get a new key warning from regular ssh you will need to log in first, to ensure the key goes into the known_hosts file.

Remote site checks¶

Conveyor makes a number of checks to the published download site (if it's been published before) to ensure that users will be able to update to new versions of your software. The way detected issues are surfaced is controlled by key app.site.consistency-checks. The possible values are error and warn.

The following checks are made:

That the Windows signing certificate matches the one used to upload packages previously. This is useful to catch the case where a certificate identity has changed e.g. due to a switch from OV to EV, change of company name and so on. Changing certificate identity without disrupting updates is not currently supported by Conveyor. If you need this feature please let us know.
That you aren't overwriting a pre-existing MSIX file. Older versions of Windows contain bugs that cause updates to fail until the next reboot if a package file is overwritten.