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, the PRIORITY value may be defined by setting GLUON_PRIORITY on the command line or in site.mk.

GLUON_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 declared in the manifest file by the variable DATE and then slowly rise up to 1 when GLUON_PRIORITY days have passed. The autoupdater checks for updates hourly (at a random minute of the hour), but usually only updates during its run between 4am and 5am, except when the whole GLUON_PRIORITY days and another 24 hours have passed.

GLUON_PRIORITY may be an integer or a decimal fraction.

Automated nightly builds

A fully automated nightly build could use the following commands:

git pull
(cd site && git pull)
make update
make clean
NUM_CORES_PLUS_ONE=$(expr $(nproc) + 1)
make -j$NUM_CORES_PLUS_ONE 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

# If fallback is true the updater will perform an update only if the timespan
# PRIORITY days (as defined in the manifest) and another 24h have passed
autoupdater --fallback