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About

This is documentation to use for the actual packaging library, once it's available as a separate component.

This is a Rust successor to Sewer56/Update.

About reloaded3packaging

reloaded3packaging is Reloaded3's package management library.

It follows the general package specification outlined in Reloaded3: About Packages

reloaded3packaging is a library that provides a set of tools to manage and update packages conforming to the Reloaded3 Package Specification.

It is designed to be used for the purpose of updating arbitrary 'packages', including but not limited to:

  • Current Application
  • Plugins
  • Modules

The goal of this library is to be extensible; allowing users to easily add support for their own components such as download sources and compression formats without requiring changes to the library code.

reloaded3packaging is based on Sewer56/Update which was inspired by Onova by Alexey Golub. The Rust library in particular adds additional features such as more advanced delta compression and .nx integration at the expense of sacrificing support for some common file formats (such as .rar, .7z etc.)

When to use reloaded3packaging

  • You ship very big updates and require delta compression support between versions.
  • You want to update things other than just the application you are running.
  • You need to support Semantic Versioning (and thus Prereleases).

When to not use reloaded3packaging

reloaded3packaging may not be suitable for your use under the following conditions

  • You need a simpler CI/CD deployment & integration experience.
  • You can only upload 1 file to a given website.

How the Library Works (Overview)

Creating a Release

  1. Create the .nx archives for your release.

    • Either using pre-included tool (reloaded3packagingtool).
    • Or by using the library API.

  2. Generated .nx archives contain special metadata in the package.

  3. Upload the .nx archives to a supported file host.

Download Routine (via Package Index)

Discovering downloadable .nx archives is usually done via a package index like the Reloaded3 Central Server

In the case of the Reloaded3 Central Server you's use the Get Package Metadata API to discover info about a given package and the Download Information API to get the download links.

The Delta Verification API may also be used to determine if you can apply a Delta Update to your package without starting a download from the remote host.

This is all abstracted away in the reloaded3packageindexclient library.

Download Routine (Manually)

It is not recommended to do this if you are managing more than 1 package.

The library does not provide caching functionality around limitations such as GitHub's 60/hour API rate limit. So there is an implicit risk that managing more than 60 packages will lead to some packages never being updated.

If you're just self-updating your own program or a very small number of packages, it is possible to use the reloaded3packaging library directly to query for updates.

This is rather efficient, since we're embedding metadata in the .nx header itself.

Delta Patching Logic

This is documented in a separate document.

See Delta Patching Logic for more information.

Self Updating

If the data to be updated is something other than the current application, everything is done inside the current process.

If the data to be updated is the current application itself AND you are on Windows, then files may be in use. In this case, the library extracts the files to a temporary directory and launches itself inside that target directory. Afterwards, the files are copied back to the original directory.

Cross Platform Support

reloaded3packaging follows the Code Guidelines of the reloaded3 project.

Expect the tech to just work on most OSes where low level libraries like mio work.

If used for self-updating, it is assumed the folder itself is writable.

The library does not check for write permissions on the folder where the application is located. If the folder is read-only, the update will fail.