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Alex Zvenigorodsky edited this page Apr 17, 2019 · 7 revisions

Welcome to the ZZipUpdate wiki!

About Me

Alex Zvenigorodsky

I'm very interested in hearing from anyone that's able to make use of this code or utility. Despite being a software engineer for a long time this is my first contribution to the Open Source Community, so I would love feedback.

Please free to email questions, comments: zzupdate@azvenigo.com Or tweet: @azvenigo

Inspiration

I have found a few things missing in all commonly available zip utilities. While they focus on having robust collections of codecs, UIs, etc. None would let me view or extract individual files from enormous zip files on a server. I would have to download the entire thing first.

I also found that most utilities were written in the days of physical hard drives where seek time was a major bottleneck in throughput. With SSDs that's no longer the case, so it made sense to support multithreaded extraction.

And something else that I had wanted was to be able to have a simple but fast utility for an application to be able to self-update. Many platforms already support keeping applications up to date, but these frequently have a lot of prerequisites for publishing. I wanted for an application to be able to self-update with minimal requirements.

How To

Self Update

Building a self update feature into an application can time consuming and error prone. The simplest approach is to have an application check a server for a newer version; and if available to download a new setup package and run it. While this is safe this can take significantly longer than necessary for your user.

Instead consider using ZZipUpdate's methods:

Method 1

  1. Publish your application's installer and a zip version of the application next to it. For example:
  2. Add a launcher to your application to call ZZipUpdate.exe for self update.
    • Whenever your application is launched call ZZipUpdate.exe with your zip package and your install path.
    • Example command line for self update:

ZZipUpdate.exe -pkg:https://myserver/app_package.zip -path:"c:\Program Files\My Application"

ZZipUpdate will extract the zip central directory and check all your local files for anything that isn't up to date or missing and download the minimum required files. Even on reasonably large applications this may only take a few seconds which is reasonable for startup times. If you wish you could also add a version check before launching ZZipUpdate to save the few seconds.

Method 2

  1. Follow method 1 but publish your application's installer as a self-extracting ZIP file.

ZZipUpdate.exe -pkg:https://myserver/app_package.exe -path:"c:\Program Files\My Application"

ZZipUpdate can work with self-extracting zip files and you can specify the EXE as a package.

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