Opt-out of auto-updating new app versions

[OiYouYeahYou]

Currently, you are using an auto-update that downloads in the background with no option to prevent the auto-download. This becomes a problem in two cases:

1. Memory and Processor hog: The auto-updater package hogs a lot of system resources, this becomes a concern on systems with lower specs. In my case, this actually renders my development laptop unusable while the updater is working.

2. Limited Data Plans: More importantly, for people on a limited data plan, routinely downloading a ~70MB electron package can eat up the data allowance. This has happened to me, unfortunately.

My request is to add an opt-out setting to prevent the auto-updater being called. Instead, requesting and comparing the version information. Then notifying the user a new version is out and requesting they download it. This enables the end-user to prevent data allowances and system resources hogging.

[shiftkey]

@OiYouYeahYou thanks for the feedback!

The auto-updater package hogs a lot of system resources, this becomes a concern on systems with lower specs. In my case, this actually renders my development laptop unusable while the updater is working.

I'd love to try this out myself and see how bad it feels. Could you tell me about your setup?

[OiYouYeahYou]

Excessive Disk I/O is something I neglected to mention.

Specs are:

• 4 GB RAM
• Dual 2.1 GHz
• ~< 5 MB/s Duplex Hard drive

Software overhead:

• VS Code
• Firefox
• Sometimes Chrome
• Discord
• Github Desktop

Whenever the electron updater runs (other software included) to even check for an update it causes a noticeable slowdown. I've also recognised this on friends systems where the worst offender is Discord, even if it's just checking. A quick taskkill of the update process will usually fix this issue though.

[shiftkey]

@OiYouYeahYou that's some great information - thanks for sharing! For reference we're using the inbuilt Electron updater APIs - based on Squirrel.Windows - but I'm sure there's room for improvement (especially on CPU and I/O usage by the sounds of it).

[tostka]

What he said. I just want to use the functionality of the classic client. I use it as a quick UI for typing up commit notes (TortoiseGit and CLI when I need more).

I don't ever plan to use the electron version: I fired Amazon Prime Music's electron app , a paid service I still have, over electron bloat and abusing my system resources and stability impacts.

Likewise, I kill Slack at the process level throughout the day, to avoid it's footprints (like the above).

If I refuse to tolerate electron impacts and overhead from the above paid, or heavily used apps, why would I add a GH version that does more of the same, when the classic does what I need with less resource overhead?

I dev on an 8gb laptop, and have to run a range of admin system monitoring apps - I don't have the system bandwidth to burn for this stuff. I just need to get classic to quit prompting me to upgrade on load.

[HackcatDev]

It'll be also nice to download only updated files, not the complete package. Most likely main GUI won't be updated in new version and Electron framework is also static. I've seen this updating model in TLauncher that updates Minecraft to newest version using only 5-6 megabytes of data when complete package requires about 80 MB to download

[shiftkey]

It'll be also nice to download only updated files, not the complete package.

@HackcatDev the framework we use in Electron on Windows, Squirrel.Windows, supports delta packages to apply just what has changed. Unfortunately there's no equivalent feature in Squirrel.Mac currently.

[mapninja]

+1 on this issue. It seems like I probably have type my extremely complex and secure admin password for Github updates 3 or 4 times a day, lately, and more than that since I get it wrong 1 or 2 times each go around. It would be great to have the option to opt out of this.

[Catfriend1]

+1 for turning off remote updates. OpenSource projects should make trust by allowing the user to decide.

[Croydon]

I'm disagreeing strongly with the new feature #750. It should be my own decision when deleting branches.

Since there doesn't seem to be any way to disable auto-updates this is forcing me to abandon GitHub Desktop completely 😞

Edit: On Windows deleting Update.exe actually does the trick

[jakubpolomsky]

Please turn off the updater or put the git binaries into a separate directory so that I don't have to modify my path every time

[huntfx]

Each time an update rolls out, everyone is our company who uses Desktop is blocked until IT manually whitelists the new executables for each person, since they're using path based firewall rules.
To avoid having to urgently ask them to drop what they're doing and fix things, we've had to resort to renaming Update.exe for now.

[zearp]

After 3 years, why isn't there a toggle for this yet? I don't want apps to download updates without asking me. Specially when I'm on a metered connection. An app that (without asking) downloads full new versions and then on the next start even upgrades itself is rather bad. What if I don't want to update to the new version for whatever reason? Why isn't there an option to disable auto-update checks or at the very least disable auto-downloading and installing these updates?

[i300220]

My version installed in dec 2020 was running perfectly fine on windows 7 64 until it autoupdated to 2.6.2 today. It never restarted until I reboot. When ran, it did not exit properly and required another reboot. I finally uninstalled it, reinstalled it to retest (bad), and finally got rid of it completely. Wasted 3 hrs on this.

See #11455

[pragmatta]

I experience a performance regression going from 2.6.4 -> 2.6.6 (#9193) and would like to disable updates until it's fixed.

[i300220]

I experience a performance regression going from 2.6.4 -> 2.6.6 (#9193) and would like to disable updates until it's fixed.

Here's what I did to stop auto updates. Hope it helps.
#11455 (comment)

[wireddown]

An app that automatically updates itself also undermines choco managed installations.

[DaJoNel]

Oddly enough, I never experienced this before updating to 3.1.5, and I’ve been using this for years. I see it’s been a problem for others a lot longer.

[djw-do]

Any movement on adding a flag/option for this?

[jessenic]

We use GitHub Desktop app also in a offline environment. How to disable the "Update check failed" popup? It's annoying and every time it happens, it layers on top of the previous one. So after a few days of having GitHub Desktop open I have to click the "Dismiss" button a dozen times to make the popup disappear.

[zearp]

I don't want to be a Debby Downer but I don't think Github cares about this issue at all.

This issue has been open for 6 years and Github with all their money and employees was unable to add two simple toggles for checking updates and automatically installing them.

Github will not fix this as they simply do not care. I've stopped using Github Desktop and I'm thinking about migrating to Codeberg or some other place where they actually listen to their users.

[zearp]

Disabling auto-update is not in our roadmap, sorry 😕

#16227 (comment)

Might as well close this issue.

[RVNJ]

Per @EricFromCanada’s suggestion (which works like a darn, by the way).

Download the last working version …

For me, the last working version under High Sierra was 3.0.0

For me, I'm running OS El Capital (10.11.6) - just recently updated and got locked out of the program and had to download an older version from an off-site might I add.

Version 3.0.6 seems to work for this OS but I'll check later to see if I can get anything more up-to-date than that running.

For now though, pressing ⌘-I on the application will open an info panel where you can tick the 'Locked' checkbox. This will prevent the app from auto-updating but won't stop it from trying to download (sadly). When it fails to update it will give you an error or two but you can ignore them.

[fredericschmidt]

Problem on OS 10.12.6 running Github Desktop >3.2.0

This is the easiest way, by far, thanks a lot !

For now though, pressing ⌘-I on the application will open an info panel where you can tick the 'Locked' checkbox. This will prevent the app from auto-updating but won't stop it from trying to download (sadly). When it fails to update it will give you an error or two but you can ignore them.

[jimrs]

jesus christ, six years

[Only4Gamer]

Per @EricFromCanada’s suggestion (which works like a darn, by the way).

Download the last working version …

For me, the last working version under High Sierra was 3.0.0

For me, I'm running OS El Capital (10.11.6) - just recently updated and got locked out of the program and had to download an older version from an off-site might I add.

Version 3.0.6 seems to work for this OS but I'll check later to see if I can get anything more up-to-date than that running.

For now though, pressing ⌘-I on the application will open an info panel where you can tick the 'Locked' checkbox. This will prevent the app from auto-updating but won't stop it from trying to download (sadly). When it fails to update it will give you an error or two but you can ignore them.

In latest version pressing command+I open issue in browser. Do you know the keyboard shortcut for the latest version? Or maybe you now know a better way to turn off auto-update?

[yereverluvinunclebert]

+1 for turning off remote updates. MUST be optional. If you need to know reasons then you haven't thought it through.

For the moment I renamed update.exe to arseUpdate.exe

[EricFromCanada]

In latest version pressing command+I open issue in browser

In Finder, have the GitHub Desktop application selected, and either press ⌘-I or select File > Get Info.

[fredjohnsen]

I may want to add that the auto-updating also tries to install a newer version that may be incompatible with an older version of the OS. Basically the application will entirely destroy itself for no real reason whatsoever (the old version still works fine for the required jobs at hand).

Almost happened to me here on a Mac OS X 10.10 "Yosemite" installation. Just by pure luck I prevented it when I cancelled the suspicious request to install some "helper tool". But if inspect the cache location for the downloaded update, the new application bundle is incompatible with Yosemite (stop symbol on the icon).

Wait... you mean the newest version of some software you use isn't perfectly compatible with a 9 YEAR OLD VERSION OF YOUR OPERATING SYSTEM?!?!?!?!?!? What is this world coming to?

[probablykasper]

@fredjohnsen No, the problem is that old versions of the software don't work with old versions of the OS. You're being very disrespectful, please stop and apologize

[yereverluvinunclebert]

Running with an older version of an operating system is a perfectly reasonable choice for any number of reasons. The comment from fred just serves to obfuscate. The issue is whether there should be an opt out for auto-updates. Of course there should be. If anyone needs an explanation I ask them to think for a while, the reasons ought to come automatically with a working brain.

There is a workaround to the auto-update for the moment, renaming the update.exe, so the priority is not quite so high on this one.

[jimrs]

I may want to add that the auto-updating also tries to install a newer version that may be incompatible with an older version of the OS. Basically the application will entirely destroy itself for no real reason whatsoever (the old version still works fine for the required jobs at hand).
Almost happened to me here on a Mac OS X 10.10 "Yosemite" installation. Just by pure luck I prevented it when I cancelled the suspicious request to install some "helper tool". But if inspect the cache location for the downloaded update, the new application bundle is incompatible with Yosemite (stop symbol on the icon).

Wait... you mean the newest version of some software you use isn't perfectly compatible with a 9 YEAR OLD VERSION OF YOUR OPERATING SYSTEM?!?!?!?!?!? What is this world coming to?

What kind of people expect these things to work?

i-is that a whopping 9 years old software??? what has the world come to, people using such outdated and obsolete software??? everyone knows that software older than 1 year cannot be functional... AND REMEMBER THE SECURITY!!!

[benguild]

does anyone know the hostname to block to prevent these updates from happening?

[Niko-O]

@benguild
Sorry, I don't know the answer, but just in case you didn't see it in this sea of comments: @Croydon found a workaround for Windows:

Edit: On Windows deleting Update.exe actually does the trick

If you are willing to invest a bit of time, you might be able to use Telerik Fiddler to find the relevant domains upon program start.

[TurtleWilly]

does anyone know the hostname to block to prevent these updates from happening?

On the Mac (e.g. via Little Snitch) you block connection it does via its "Github Desktop Helper" component (the update is loaded over raw.githubusercontent.com). The main application then still can access repositories via github.com itself (for fetch, etc.)

[benguild]

does anyone know the hostname to block to prevent these updates from happening?

On the Mac (e.g. via Little Snitch) you block connection it does via its "Github Desktop Helper" component (the update is loaded over raw.githubusercontent.com). The main application then still can access repositories via github.com itself (for fetch, etc.)

That domain's not specific to that, though. I was hoping to figure out if there was a way to block the updates themselves from even being considered, but not sure.

[TurtleWilly]

That domain's not specific to that, though. I was hoping to figure out if there was a way to block the updates themselves from even being considered, but not sure.

That's the only thing it seems to load from that domain though. Blocking it works fine and the unwanted and broken updates stopped. The rest of the functions related to repositories continue to work fine.

If you wanted to block the domain globally via /etc/hosts then that wouldn't work, of course.

[hiiamboris]

After reading this thread, I got rid of GH Desktop out of solidarity :)

[cr-jkb]

I got here because the latest GitHub Desktop Version has issues with the merge dialog and some other functions. I waited in hope for a fix but the next fixing update takes already multiple weeks to arrive.

Therefore I searched for an Auto-Update Disable on Github Desktop because some of my machines still have older GitHub Desktop Versions installed, which however update themselves automatically when I use them. But once I can open and use the older version on each machine. On Restart the update is already installing, which I'd like to be able to bypass in the future

[bakomon]

+1

[alainbryden]

I work in a corporate environment where once GitHub Desktop auto-updates itself, the new executable is blocked by group policy because it wasn't installed via the standard process. We need an option to defer the update so that it can be installed via the correct process.