Autoupdate

In the era of continuous deployment, new releases are issued pretty often. As developers, we have to ensure that users receive the updates transparently, without going through the download/install routine. With the traditional web application, it's taken for granted. Users hit the page and the latest version gets loaded. With desktop applications, we need to deliver the update. Unfortunately, NW.js doesn't provide any built-in facilities to handle autoupdates, but we can trick it; let's see how.

First of all, we need a simple release server. Let's give it a folder (for example, server) and create the manifest file there:

./server/package.json

{ 
  "name": "release-server", 
  "version": "1.0.0", 
  "packages": { 
    "linux64": { 
     "url": "http://localhost:8080/releases/file...