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Release Using Channels / Auto-Updates With Channels

Description​

Channels are useful to distribute "beta" or "alpha" releases of your application to a chosen set of users. This allows to test an application before release it as "latest" (stable).

Users which receive "beta" version will get "latest" versions too. Otherwise, users who don't want "beta" will only get "latest" releases.

There are three channels, ordered by stability:

  1. "latest", your application is stable and this is the default one (example: 1.3.2),
  2. "beta" which means your application works, but should have some bugs (example: 1.3.2-beta)
  3. "alpha" which means your application is not stable and in active development (example: 1.3.2-alpha)

Configuration​

To release using channels, you should config electron-builder and define the channels to use in client side.

Electron-Builder​

By default (without using channels), all application releases use the "latest" channel.

If you want to use channels, you should add this to your package.json:

"version": "x.x.x-beta",
...
"build": {
  "generateUpdatesFilesForAllChannels": true,
  ...
}
note

allowDowngrade is automatically set to true when generateUpdatesFilesForAllChannels = true, so you don't need to set it.

All you have to do to release using channels is to define the channel in the version tag of the package.json. Add "-beta" or "-alpha" (nothing for "latest") to automatically build for the related channel.

warning

Github release does not respect the version in the version tag even if detectUpdateChannel is true. You must explicitly set channel (see GitHub publish options) to match the intended release channel.

Your Application​

All you need to do here is to define which channel the user will receive with:

autoUpdater.channel = "beta" (see auto-update documentation)

The following versions will be distributed to users depending on the channel defined:

  • latest or nothing: users will only get "latest" versions
  • beta: users will get "beta" and "latest" version
  • alpha: users will get "alpha", "beta" and "latest" version

How To Use It​

Imagine that your application is stable and in version 1.0.1.

If you want to release a beta for the new 1.1.0 version, you only need to update the package.json version with 1.1.0-beta.

When your application is stable enough, you want to release it to all users. For that, you only need to remove the -beta label from the package.json version tag.