How does Update checking work?

[robi]

Having a stopped app for a few months requires checking for updates until all are installed, but each time it takes a considerable amount of time to find out there is even an update available. (longer than the app update itself.)

What happens under the hood when one clicks "Check for Updates" for the app?

How can we optimize this to be faster or in parallel as an App upgrade happens?

[msbt]

@robi I reckon that's what the schedule in Settings / Updates is for, if you're missing many updates, you can manually check, update and repeat until there are no more updates available

[girish]

@robi Check for updates, always checks the updates for all the apps and the platform code. I am guessing you probably have a lot of apps, which is why you see it take a bit of time. It's not optimized for a user clicking 'check for updates' periodically by themselves.

[robi]

@girish thanks, that was my intuition, hence the ask for somehow getting the next app update available during the previous update install or check, so extra clicking can be avoided.

Is there a bundle being downloaded with all the manifests of updates available?

If a cloudron could store a list of all available updates from one check, until the next, then no rechecks need to be made via redundant api calls.

If it can be app specific, that would be great too.

[nebulon]

@robi generally Cloudron does check for updates periodically and will show them in the dashboard. The manual update checker is just to get that faster. Within one day you should see the updates without manual checking. So unless we simply check more frequently, I am not sure I understand what we can do to improve this.
The Cloudron does not really download anything as such, but issues an API call to the appstore asking if there is a new version for app X@versionY and it will return some JSON blob. So this is not a heavy operation, but I maybe we can improve the situation for cases with lots of apps.
But before that, I would first like to understand the need to frequently do manual checks in the first place.

[msbt]

@girish so the "check for updates" button in settings has the same behaviour as the one in apps/config? I remember updating an ancient LAMP app several times in a row by clicking the button in the apps config, wasn't taking long at all, only received an email for every update that was available after checking.

[girish]

@msbt yes, the buttons do the same. It's just in multiple places for convenience (and maybe in some future day, we optimize it).

[robi]

@nebulon What you can do to improve this is keep the "Upgrade available" button green for as long as there are updates to an app that is several versions behind. (without having to check again and again and again, right after an update)

The other even better option would be to have another button that shows up if there is more than one update available for an app that will do ALL the updates until complete.

Or perhaps that is the default desired functionality.. Update to latest.

[nebulon]

@robi what is the actual reason, which makes this not a very rare corner-case? Generally apps should be updated timely anyways no?

[robi]

@nebulon there are many:

• sub runs out for some time
• app is stopped to conserve resources and brought back
• app is unresponsive (awaiting fix timeslots & updates)
• app backup is restored needing many updates
• ???

In each of these cases, multiple updates need to be done and the current flow makes it difficult and tedious to set it and forget it.

Imagine what it's like when 2+ months of updates are available across 30+ apps.