Nuts

Nuts is a simple (and smart) application to serve desktop-application releases.

It uses GitHub as a backend to store assets, and it can easily be deployed to Heroku as a stateless service. It supports GitHub private repositories (useful to store releases of a closed-source application available on GitHub).

Features

• Store assets on GitHub releases
• Proxy releases from private repositories to your users
• Simple but powerful download urls
  • /download/latest
  • /download/latest/:os
  • /download/:version
  • /download/:version/:os
  • /download/channel/:channel
  • /download/channel/:channel/:os
• Support pre-release channels (beta, alpha, ...)
• Auto-updates with Squirrel
  • For Mac using /update?version=<x.x.x>&platform=osx
  • For Windows using Squirrel.Windows and Nugets packages
• Private API
• Use it as a middleware: add custom analytics, authentication
• Serve the perfect type of assets: .zip for Squirrel.Mac, .nupkg for Squirrel.Windows, .dmg for Mac users, ...
• Up-to-date releases (GitHub webhooks)

Deploy it / Start it

Install dependencies using:

$ npm install

This service requires to be configured using environment variables:

# Set the port for the service
$ export PORT=6000

# Access token for the GitHub API (requires permissions to access the repository)
# you can also use GITHUB_USERNAME and GITHUB_PASSWORD
$ export GITHUB_TOKEN=...

# ID for the GitHub repository
$ export GITHUB_REPO=Username/MyApp

# Authentication for the private API
$ export API_USERNAME=hello
$ export API_PASSWORD=world

Then start the application using:

$ npm start

Assets for releases

Nuts uses some filename/extension conventions to serve the correct asset to a specific request:

Platform will be detected from the filename:

• Windows: filename should contain win
• Mac/OS X: filename should contain mac or osx
• Linux: filename should contain linux

By default releases are tagged as 32-bits (except for OSX), but 64-bits will also be detected from filenames.

Filetype and usage will be detected from the extension:

• .dmg will be served in priority to Mac users
• .nupkg will only be served to Squirrel.Windows requests
• Otherwise, .zip are advised (Linux, Mac, Windows and Squirrel.Mac)

Download urls

Nuts provides urls to access releases assets. These assets are cached on the disk.

• Latest version for detected platform: http://download.myapp.com/download/latest or http://download.myapp.com/download
• Latest version for specific platform: http://download.myapp.com/download/latest/osx or `http://download.myapp.com/download/osx
• Specific version for detected platform: http://download.myapp.com/download/1.1.0
• Specific version for specific platform: http://download.myapp.com/download/1.2.0/osx
• Specific channel: http://download.myapp.com/download/channel/beta
• Specific channel for specific platform: http://download.myapp.com/download/channel/beta/osx

Platforms

Platforms can be detected from user-agent and are normalized to values: osx, osx_32, osx_64, linux, linux_32, linux_64, windows, windows_32, windows_64.

Non-prefixed platform will be resolve to 32 bits (except for OSX).

Auto-updater / Squirrel

This server provides an endpoint for Squirrel auto-updater: http://download.myapp.com/update/osx/:currentVersion.

Squirrel.Mac

This url requires different parameters to return a correct version: version and platform.

For example with Electron's auto-updater module:

var app = require('app');
var os = require('os');
var autoUpdater = require('auto-updater');

var platform = os.platform() + '_' + os.arch();
var version = app.getVersion();

autoUpdater.setFeedUrl('http://download.myapp.com/update/'+platform+'/'+version);

Squirrel.Windows

Nuts will serve NuGet packages on http://download.myapp.com/update/win32/:version/RELEASES.

Your application just need to configurer Update.exe or Squirrel.Windows to use http://download.myapp.com/update/win32/:version as a feed url ( without query parameters).

You'' just need to upload as release assets: RELEASES, *-delta.nupkg and -full.nupkg (files generated by Squirrel.Windows releaser).

Private API

A private API is available to access more infos about releases and stats. This API can be protected by HTTP basic auth (username/password) using configuration API_USERNAME and API_PASSWORD.

List versions:

GET http://download.myapp.com/api/versions

Get details about specific version:

GET http://download.myapp.com/api/version/1.1.0

Resolve a version:

GET http://download.myapp.com/api/resolve?platform=osx&channel=alpha

List channels:

GET http://download.myapp.com/api/channels

Get stats about downloads:

GET http://download.myapp.com/api/stats

GitHub Webhook

Add http://download.myapp.com/refresh as a GitHub webhook to refresh versions cache everytime you update a release on GitHub.

Integrate it as a middleware

Nuts can be integrated into a Node.JS application as a middleware. Using the middleware, you can add custom authentication on downloads or analytics for downloads counts.

var express = require('express');
var Nuts = require('nuts-serve');

var app = express();
var nuts = Nuts(
    // GitHub configuration
    repository: "Me/MyRepo",
    token: "my_api_token",

    // Timeout for releases cache (seconds)
    timeout: 60*60,

    // Folder to cache assets (by default: a temporary folder)
    cache: './assets',

    // Pre-fetch list of releases at startup
    preFetch: true,

    // Secret for refresh webhook
    refreshSecret: 'my-secret',

    // Middlewares
    onDownload: function(version, req, res, next) {
        console.log('download', download.version.tag, "on channel", download.version.channel, "for", download.platform.type);
        next();
    },
    onAPIAccess: function(req, res, next) {
        next();
    }
);

app.use('/myapp', nuts);
app.listen(4000);