Built-in capacities for auto updates is one of Electron's most prominent advantages over NW.js. Electron's autoUpdater module (http://bit.ly/1KKdNQs) utilizes the Squirrel framework (https://github.com/Squirrel), which makes silent possible. It works nicely in conjunction with the existing solution for multiplatform release servers; in particular, one can run it with Nuts (https://github.com/GitbookIO/nuts) using GitHub as a backend. We can also quickly set up a fully-featured node server based on electron-release-server (https://github.com/ArekSredzki/electron-release-server), which includes release management UI.
Electron-updater doesn't support Linux. The project maintainers recommend using the distribution's package manager to update the application.
For the sake of brevity, we will walk through a simplified autoupdate approach that...