updater-demo

Release target for the Wails v3 updater example (v3/examples/updater — the feature is still on a branch; this link follows the PR). Each tagged release of this repository ships pre-built bare binaries for darwin/arm64, linux/amd64, and windows/amd64 plus a SHA256SUMS sidecar, so the example can demonstrate the full update flow end-to-end against a real GitHub release.

Bare, not archived. The updater renames the downloaded asset onto the running binary's path; if the asset were a .tar.gz or .zip the rename would land a compressed file in place of the executable and exec() would fail.

This repo is not a starter template. For that, run wails3 init. This is the artifact source the framework's updater example downloads from when you click App → Check for Updates…

What the binary does

It opens a single window that prints its own version in big letters and mirrors updater:* events into a status panel. The version is baked in at build time via -ldflags="-X main.version=<v>", so v1.0.0 and v2.0.0 are visually distinguishable.

Cutting a release

Releases are built natively on three machines and combined manually — there's no CI here on purpose (the demo is small, the manual flow is transparent).

1. On each platform, clone the repo and run:

   VERSION=2.0.0 scripts/build.sh

   produces dist/updater-demo_<goos>_<goarch>.<ext>.

2. Collect all archives into a single host's dist/ directory via scp and run:

   scripts/release.sh 2.0.0

   which computes SHA256SUMS and gh release creates the tag with every archive attached.

Platform notes

• darwin: bare binary, not a .app bundle. The updater's helper does a direct exec.Command(target) on swap, and the example runs as a plain binary too — keeping both sides as plain binaries avoids .app-vs-binary swap-type mismatches.
• linux: depends on libgtk-3 and libwebkit2gtk-4.1 at runtime. The updater preserves the original target's mode (incl. +x) after the swap so the relaunched binary runs.
• windows: built with -H windowsgui so the binary has no console window when launched. Requires WebView2 Runtime on the user's machine (preinstalled on Win10 1903+).

License

MIT — see LICENSE.