ABC Updater

This is not an official Google product.

Description

ABC updater is an embeddable library to notify application users if there is a newer version available.

In the future, it may include security bulletin features, and coarse metrics.

It is intended to be run with a separate backend, where application information is stored in JSON. Version checks and notifications will only happen once per day.

Opt Out

You can opt out of update notifications. Every application consuming abc updater will define an app id. toUpperCase(id) can be used in an env var to do so.

For example, if an app had id foo_bar_123, you could opt out by setting the env var FOO_BAR_123_IGNORE_VERSIONS.

This is most easily shown by example:

# If newest version is 1.0.7, don't notify
FOO_BAR_123_IGNORE_VERSIONS=1.0.7
# Don't notify unless new version if at least 2.0.0
FOO_BAR_123_IGNORE_VERSIONS=<2.0.0
# Don't check for new versions at all.
FOO_BAR_123_IGNORE_VERSIONS=ALL

# You can combine multiple constraints with commas:
# Don't notify if new version is 1.9.3 or 2.0.3 
FOO_BAR_123_IGNORE_VERSIONS=1.9.3,2.0.3

Implementer can provide their own lookuper in method params, which will look up without using prefix. For Example It would just be IGNORE_VERSIONS.

Limitations

Currently, only the newest version is fetched. This means that if you are on 1.3.0 and some fix 1.4.0 was released after a 2.0 was released, you would only be notified of the 2.0, and if you ignored 2.0, you still would not see the 1.4.0.

Metrics Server

This server has a few parts:

Metrics endpoint to accept metric calls.
Fetcher to collect information about allowed metrics.
Logger which logs metrics into cloud logging.

Allowed Metrics

Defined in metrics.json file hosted next to version info for updater.

Example:

{
	app_id: abc
	allowed_metrics: [
		"metric_name_1",
		"metric_name_2",
	]
}

Server will look up all metrics.json files periodically. A manifest.json file tells the server the list of apps to look up.

Collected Metadata

Along with each metric, some metadata is sent:

App ID
App Version
First Install DateTime with minute granularity.

Default Server

The default server referenced in the client config is intended for projects in the abcxyz GitHub org. Metrics are retained for 24 months.

For other projects, consumers of this library should host their own metrics server.

abcxyz/abc-updater