Ability for apps to update while shutdown

[ChristopherMag]

I have a number of apps that we use infrequently, monthly and some yearly.

We will run a lot through them for a month or so, finish out the annual task, and then stop them until next year.

This was working ok but in a subsequent cloudron update, not sure which one but it was months ago at least, now we I get a notification in the web interface of the app needing to be updated and since it is shutdown and doesn't update it means I will now get notifications every single day even thought here is nothing to take action on.

It would be nice for these apps to be kept up to date but I don't want to have to leave them running all the time.

Currently I have to manually start them when updates are available and then shut them down again after they have updated but across the 7 or so apps we have like this it is a pain.

Can the update system be changed so that it starts up stopped apps that need updates, updates them, and then shuts them down again?

[nebulon]

Thats an interesting case. It seems to me we have to fix up the notification behavior though. I don't think we should start the app, update it and stop it again, as that means any potential update error within the app (like some data migration bug) will be unnoticed until the next time you actually have the use-case to use the app again. So I think while the app is dormant it should also be kept like that. But maybe I miss some other cases here?

[robi]

@nebulon A setting to start apps before a backup, then have them update and shutdown after might be a workflow that applies here.

[ChristopherMag]

@robi This would be nice for sure.

@nebulon Ignoring stopped apps so that they don't trigger notifications, don't check for updates, and don't have the green circle with the down arrow next to them would be sufficient to alleviate the immediate pain point.

I have had an issue though with apps that remain dormant for long periods, say like our peer tube instance with a number of videos to onboard a new employee but we don't hire that frequently so it doesn't need to be on all the time, when we do start it up we have a lot of updates missed and it takes a lot of manually clicking update over and over again to get caught up.

If stopped apps are not going to be updated it would be nice to have a button to click to say update to latest or some workflow to express to the system to just keep doing updates till it reaches the latest version as that is what I have to do manually currently.

The most painful exmaple is N8N as I have a test instance with test credentials separate from the production instance.

I don't want to load production credentials in the test instance and vice versa but I don't need the test instance running all the time.

That app updates so frequently that it has taken over a month of it updating every day on its own plus me clicking manually to tell it to update an additional time many weekdays when I check cloudron's health and it has just now finally caught up. Would have been very nice to have an update till you reach latest button and let it go to town updating 50+ times to catch up, I could tell it to start when I leave for the day and by the time I get back in it will be up to date.

[subven]

@nebulon said in Ability for apps to update while shutdown:

I don't think we should start the app, update it and stop it again, as that means any potential update error within the app (like some data migration bug) will be unnoticed until the next time you actually have the use-case to use the app again. So I think while the app is dormant it should also be kept like that.

Thats the correct approach and a good philosophy.

@ChristopherMag said in Ability for apps to update while shutdown:

That app updates so frequently that it has taken over a month of it updating every day on its own plus me clicking manually to tell it to update an additional time many weekdays when I check cloudron's health and it has just now finally caught up.

You can fix this behavior by adjusting automatic updates. This way you just need to start the apps in question and within 24h you can (in theory) have 24 update checks per app. Keep in mind to not interfere with the backup schedule.

You can even automate the procedure to 1: Start individual apps 2: Temporary change autoupdate schedule 3: Stop apps and change schedule to normal behavior.

[ChristopherMag]

@subven I didn't realize I could set it to run updates multiple hours of the day, I have made that change so that it will update every hour during non working hours, this will definitely resolve the situation where a app hasn't been started in a long time and has a bunch of updates to catch up on.

[privsec]

@ChristopherMag

Make sure you don’t overlap the backup and update hours

[ChristopherMag]

@privsec Thank you! I had overlapped these but have now fixed it, great catch!