integrating/overview

[giscus[bot]]

integrating/overview

To integrate Velopack into your application, you must initialise the Velopack as early as possible in app startup, and you should add update checking code somewhere.

https://docs.velopack.io/integrating/overview

[yprism]

(unrelated question to this page)
Is it possible to prompt the user to choose a file during installation process? e.g. license file location?

[caesay]

Feel free to join our Discord or open an issue on GitHub if you have general questions which are not related to the docs. But to answer your question, it's currently not possible to customise the installer journey or show any custom UI. You can prompt for a license file on your app's first start. There may be more configuration available after velopack/velopack#30 is released, but I'm not sure exactly what that will look like yet.

[wangdasheng360]

My asp.net core application needs to be installed into the system service. Can I use Velopack to automatically install it into the system service and update it automatically?

[caesay]

Velopack currently (as of July 2024) does not support installing or updating Windows Services.

[enisn]

How about roll-back the last update? Or installing a specific version? (The previous version in my case)

[enisn]

✅Found the answer in Discord community

Thanks to @caesay

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You can list the available releases using IUpdateSource.GetReleaseFeed, and provided you want to download/apply one of those, just create a new UpdateInfo class given the VelopackAsset you'd like to update to, and then follow the usual download/apply steps.

[verySpicyHeatWave]

Where would I put the VelopackApp.Build().Run() call in, say, a VB.Net app that doesn't have a "Main" function? Would the main form loading event handler be an appropriate place?

[caesay]

It should be as early in your app startup as possible. If you are using WPF or WinForms, you can create a Main function (and not take the default). There are Velopack samples showing how to do this. Alternatively, you could add it to your Application constructor or OnStartup etc.

It should not be a part of a form loading handler, as that implies your app startup has already executed a significant amount of code, enough to start showing a window.

[cyechow]

I just stumbled across this today while looking at installation frameworks options with good auto-update handling and it looks awesome!

I don't think I saw anything about this in the docs, ClickOnce has a feature where it's able to to launch applications via a URL. This also depends on browser settings/extensions installed but essentially it generates a *.application file which you can upload to a cloud storage location, like S3, and then enter https://example.com/myapp.application which will just launch the application without downloading an installer. It will skip installing the app if it's already there. It's also able to accept query parameters in the URL that gets interpreted when running the application.

Are these things that Velopack can do or will do in the future?

[caesay]

It's not possible to replicate this, it's a ClickOnce/Microsoft exclusive as far as I'm aware, so no - not planned.