Can GitHub Actions be used for providing versioning (For AutoUpdate)?

Hi, I think (maybe I’ve misunderstood) that there’s some way of making a script auto-update.

i.e. “newer than the one version you have, update to the newest version”.

What I’m wondering is, what’s the logic for that, how is it done, and more so, how would i use GitHub Actions to create a versioning method that would automatically update the script that others have already downloaded and installed?

Look at Manifest.xml. It has the version number for the tool.

I would suggest doing this manually. I doubt GitHub actions would be able to know when to increment the major version or the minor version. I think you would have saner versioning if you used your own judgment on that. E.g., increment the minor version on a bug fix, increment major when you add a notable feature or break previous behavior. I assume you are already writing a change.log or README file as well to document this, as part of the release process.

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Technically your tool could download your manifest.xml file from your github repo and check if the version is different or not, then patch it’s own folder with new files. There are a lot of opinions around how to use semantic versioning but the simplest in this case is to consider the remote version newer if the version string is different from the local version.

Github Actions won’t help much with this. Github already serves the files in your repo and the rest of the stuff would need to be done inside your tool with lua.

That said, “phoning home” by default is not good manners, your tool shouldn’t connect to the internet and download files autonomously in my opinion. This raises some privacy and security issues. If you implement such a feature, make sure to make it opt-in.