latest-versions

latest-versions checks if there's an upgrade available for installed software.

This is just a simple tool I made to check if I need to update some software on my computer. For each program I want to check, first it runs some code to figure out which version I have installed, then it goes to the software's web page and scrapes the latest version available for download.

Then it prints its results out onto the console.

Usage

I used Python 3.6.2 on Windows 10 while writing this program.

1. Clone this project and go into the directory where it resides.
2. Create and activate a virtualenv if you want, and run python -m pip install -r requirements.txt
   • It just wants to install requests (HTTP library) and beautifulsoup4 (HTML parsing).
3. Run python -m versions.latest

An example of the results:

Software: asdf
    Installed Version : 3.2.1
    Latest Version    : 3.2.1
Software: git
    Installed Version : 2.14.0.windows.1
    Latest Version    : 2.14.1.windows.1
    An upgrade is available.
Software: Zulu OpenJDK
    Installed Version : 1.8.0_144
    Latest Version    : 1.8.0_144
Software: Python
    Installed Version : 3.6.2
    Latest Version    : 3.6.2
Software: 7-Zip
    Installed Version : 16.04
    Latest Version    : 16.04
Software: vim
    Installed Version : 8.0
    Latest Version    : 8.0
Software: WinMerge
    Installed Version : 2.14.0
    Latest Version    : 2.14.0

Programming Guide

The versions.software package contains one module for each program you're interested in, plus a utils.py for common utility functions.

Each module implements three functions that all return strings:

1. name()
   • Return the name of the software.
   • This is only used when printing out the version report.
2. installed_version()
   • Figure out what version you have installed locally and return it.
   • Usually, I use the subprocess module to run the program and then strip out the version string from whatever it prints out.
   • Sometimes there's no easy way to programmatically determine the version so I just hardcode the version I know I have. It doesn't really matter since the important piece is finding out what the latest version is.
3. latest_version()
   • Figure out what the latest version of the software is and return it.
   • Usually I use the Requests library to grab the info from the web page, then use the Beautiful Soup library to scrape the version out of the HTML.

versions/latest.py uses the pkgutil module to load each module in the versions.software package and then determine which modules implement all three functions above. For those modules, it then runs each of the three functions and prints out a report.

If you want to add support for another software package, create a new python file inside the versions.software package and implement the three functions. It should automatically get picked up next time you run versions/latest.py.