Why is it so hard to get Autoupdate set up?

[clutchonline]

I've been trying for months now to set up Autoupdate on my plugin, to no avail. My users have had to manually update their files.

What I need is a legitimate guide on how this process works. The tutorial on the website seems to completely gloss over the actual autoupdate URL itself, just explaining the updatelist.txt. How will my users update their program?

Let's start at the beginning.


I'm working right now just with the plugininfo.txt before I get going on the other files.

https://github.com/ClutchOnline/Clutch-Baseball

There's my github, where you can see the updatelist.txt and the plugininfo.txt files. My CardGeneralURLs works fine. Please, can someone tell me if this set up is correct, and if so, what do I paste into the Autoupdate box in Lackey to get it to update?


And no, for the time being I can't host my files on a domain, I have to use either github, dropbox, drive, etc. I've already tried dropbox and drive and they seem completely busted for Lackey, so I guess github is the way.


I'm sorry if I come off rude, I'm just really frustrated. The tutorial is very incomplete, and there's very little in the way of information on this forum beyond "host things yourself" and "shoot me a DM".

[CrazyChucky]

The update URL is the URL of the updatelist file. That's it. In your case, it should be https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ClutchOnline/Clutch-Baseball/master/updatelist.txt

But your updatelist has a problem. It lists the remote URL of the plugininfo file as https://github.com/ClutchOnline/Clutch-Baseball/blob/master/plugininfo.txt
That does not take you to the file itself, it takes you to the web page displaying info about the file. You need the URL of the plain, raw file itself (which you can get by clicking the "raw" button over the file display): https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ClutchOnline/Clutch-Baseball/master/plugininfo.txt

Lackey is not a web browser; it's never going to have any way of knowing how to download files from rich web pages. You need to send it directly to plain text files.

[clutchonline]

Interesting, I will try that, thank you!


I'm not very computer savvy (well I mean that's obvious, if any of us were computer savvy we'd be using OCTGN instead haha), I didn't know that.

[CrazyChucky]

Sure, I hope it helps.

Note that this should work for downloading the files via Lackey using the "Install or Update from URL" button. If you want Lackey to actually auto-update?that is, check for updates at launch and download things if they've changed?you will also need checksums and a version.txt file. The process is as follows:

• When Lackey is launched, it loads the last used plugin.
• It checks the local copy of the plugin's version.txt, and uses it to find the URL of the remote version.txt.
• If the remote copy has a newer date, it then checks the remote updatelist.txt and sees if any of its listed files have checksums different than the local copies of those files.
• Lackey downloads all those files and asks to reload the plugin.

Note also that this means if you change your remote plugin files more than once in the same day, any user who got the first update won't automatically get the second update (unless they go and click "Install or update from URL" themselves).

[CrazyChucky]

Also, huh, I've never heard of OCTGN before. It looks interesting.

[clutchonline]

Nope, when I use that autoupdate link it says "unable to download a valid updatelist.txt."

Also yeah I'm not gonna bother with checksums and all that, I just want the link.

[clutchonline]

Also yeah OCTGN is a great program, it's just a lot harder to set up.

[CrazyChucky]

Okay, I looked at your updatelist file a bit more closely, and there are a few more issues.

• You have spaces instead of tabs between the plugin name and date, and between the local and remote URLs.
• You do need a placeholder checksum, just a random number after the URLs (separated by a tab).
• I don't think Lackey plays nicely with plugin names that have spaces in them. I'd recommend "ClutchBaseball" or "clutch-baseball" or something similar.
• Lastly, whatever name you pick, be consistent. The plugin name in the top line should exactly match the folder name into which you're downloading files. (You currently have a case difference, which might not cause a problem? But really they should be the same.)

[CrazyChucky]

Hey! Just tried out your update URL, glad to see you got it working.

Did you notice you've got a bunch of extra, unlabeled fields at the end of each line? Some cards leave them blank, some repeat the same name over and over again.