Overview

Glow is a tool that generates Sparkle-compatible Appcast update feeds and html release notes for your Mac projects. It's not a full blown, database driven, multiple project supporting, update releasing laser canon. Rather it's a clean, easy to use script that will automate 90% of releasing updates to your users.

The templates are text transformed by Jekyll.

Features

• Automatically fetches file size, version number, build number and signature from new releases.
• Supports regular as well as beta builds by looking at the version number.
• Supports Markdown for writing release notes.
• Automatically updates the index page after each new update.
• Automatically generates a new page for each update.
• Supports .zip and .dmg releases.
• Clean and simple theme included.
• Easily add your own theme by changing templates and css.

Prerequisites

• A basic understanding of how Sparkle works.
• An app with updates to deploy.
• A server to host your updates.

How Glow Works

• Glow looks for an .app file.
• Glow parses the Info.plist of your app bundle for its version number, build number and creation date.
• Glow checks if a compressed update file exists.
• Glow optionally generates a Sparkle signature using your private key.
• Glow checks the compressed update's file size.
• Glow generates a new Jekyll-compatible file with the information above.
• Glow creates (or updates) a symbolic link called YourApp-latest.zip/dmg that points to the latest update. If the latest addition isn't a beta release.
• Jekyll generates html release notes and Appcast feeds for regular and beta releases.

Status

Glow powers release notes and automatic updates for all Danger Cove apps.

Setup

Directory Structure

Create a new folder and lay it out like this:

.
|- dsa_priv.pem (optional)
|- sign_update.rb (optional)
|- YourApp.app

sign_update.rb is included with Sparkle and dsa_priv.pem is generated using generate_keys.rb, also included with Sparkle. Signatures are optional but recommended, especially for unsigned apps. For signed apps, Sparkle will check if the identity of the update matches the original's.

Enter your newly created folder and clone glow.

$ git clone git@github.com:DangerCove/glow.git glow

Go into glow and type rake setup. This will install (a) gem(s) and create (a) folder(s). (This sentence is super future proof.)

The final directory structure looks like this.

.
|- dsa_priv.pem
|- sign_update.rb
|- glow/
|  |- _config-sample.yml (rename to _config.yml and edit)
|  |- _drafts/
|  |- _includes/ (html header and footer)
|  |- _layouts/ (page and update html layout)
|  |- _posts/ (will contain update release notes)
|  |- _site/ (things you will deploy, created after first run)
|     |- download/ (actual update binaries)
|     |- update/ (generated update pages)
|        |- appcast-beta.rss (regular + beta updates)
|        |- appcast.rss (regular updates)
|        |- .. generated html files
|  |- appcast-beta.rss (beta rss template)
|  |- appcast.rss (regular rss template)
|  |- css/ (style sheets)
|  |- glow.rb (script that does all the work)
|  |- .. project files 
|- YourApp.app

Customize

Rename _config-sample.yml to _config.yml and open it in your favorite editor.

Change the following lines. The rest is optional.

url: http://update.project.com
file_host: http://download.project.com
title: Your Project for Mac Updates
description: This feed contains application updates.
google_analytics: UA-12345678-90

Change your index.html page title in index.md.

Adding Updates

Regular Update

• Replace YourApp.app with the latest version.
• Note the version number of YourApp.app. 0.3 for instance.
• Compress YourApp.app and rename the zip (or dmg) to YourApp-v[version number].zip. YourApp-v0.3.zip for instance.
• Copy it to glow/_site/download.
• Run rake add.

This will create a new post in glow/_posts/. Open that in your editor as well. It should look something like this.

---
layout: update
title: 
time: 2013-10-22 11:03:58 +0200
version: 0.3
bundle: 1
signature: [random bunch of characters]
file_size: 3810620
file: YourApp-v0.3b.zip
---

* Bugfixes

Enter your release notes where it says * Bugfixes and add a title if you want.

Beta Update

Follow the steps above, only make sure your version number ends with b (customizable in _config.yml). For instance: 0.3b.

You'll notice after generating a post, it will have an extra property: beta: true.

Previewing the Updates

Run rake preview and open http://localhost:4000/.

Deploying

Working on this. I'm rsyncing the contents of _site to my server. Would love to be able to have different deploy options.

For now, running rake deploy will execute a script called deploy.sh inside the _site folder.

Known Issues

• The directory structure is rather strict.
• App names need to be equal to compressed file names. Could cause trouble for app names with spaces.
• (Currently) no support for more advanced Sparkle settings, like minimumSystemVersion. Shouldn't be too hard to add though.

Contributions and Things to add

Keep in mind that Glow is meant to be simple and easy to customize. Feel free to restructure code. It's currently very, ehm, procedural.

Things I'd like to add:

• Deployment options.
• Automatic zipping or dmg-creating (using Dropdmg for instance).
• Add the build number after the beta indicator to allow for multiple beta builds for one version number, e.g. Tapetrap-v0.3b10.zip and Tapetrap-v0.3b11.zip.

License

New BSD License, see LICENSE for details.