autoupdater.rst

Autoupdater

Gluon contains an automatic update system which can be configured in the site configuration.

Building Images

By default, the autoupdater is disabled (as it is usually not helpful to have unexpected updates during development), but it can be enabled by setting the variable GLUON_BRANCH when building to override the default branch set in the set in the site configuration.

A manifest file for the updater can be generated with make manifest. A signing script (using ecdsautils) can by found in the contrib directory. When creating the manifest, GLUON_PRIORITY can be set on the command line, or it can be taken from the site.mk.

The priority defines the maximum number of days that may pass between releasing an update and installation of the images. The update probability will start at 0 after the release time mentioned in the manifest and then slowly rise to 1 up to the point when the number of days given by the priority has passed.

The priority may be an integer or a decimal fraction.

A fully automated nightly build could use the following commands:

git pull
(cd site && git pull)
make update
make clean
make -j5 GLUON_TARGET=ar71xx-generic GLUON_BRANCH=experimental
make manifest GLUON_BRANCH=experimental
contrib/sign.sh $SECRETKEY output/images/sysupgrade/experimental.manifest

rm -rf /where/to/put/this/experimental
cp -r output/images /where/to/put/this/experimental

Infrastructure

We suggest to have following directory tree accessible via http:

firmware/
        stable/
                sysupgrade/
                factory/
        snapshot/
                sysupgrade/
                factory/
        experimental/
                sysupgrade/
                factory/

The server must be available via IPv6.

Command Line

These commands can be used on a node:

# Update with some probability
autoupdater

# Force update check, even when the updater is disabled
autoupdater -f