Purpose

The RasPlex update server is design to connect the rasplex-installer, and in-app plex auto-update features to GitHub releases.

Which OpenELEC provides a decent update service, we've opted to use the plex built-in update system as it provides a more native experience, that is consistent across all plex platforms.

When a client connects to update or download, this is also recorded, giving us statistics about our userbase.

Github limits polling via public interface to 60 times per hour per IP, so this acts as a cache and lets us query as much as we like.

The major advantage to this is it allows us to take advantage of github's free and powerful CDN, but still have control over release logic.

Note: this project obsoletes the old sinatra based rasplex update server

Architecture

The rasplex update server now uses hubot to combine the chatops functionalty with the expressjs asynchronous web server for high throughput requests.

No actual images are served from this server (except the beta channel), all images are fetch from Github, which is backed by a public S3 bucket.

We can now manage and view many aspects of the update server and relevant statistics directly from chat! Just use 'rasbot help' in the slack channel.

API

/update

Returns a well-formatted XML file suitable for updating a plexHT installation based on the update.erb.

  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
  <MediaContainer friendlyName="myPlex" identifier="com.plexapp.plugins.myplex" size="1" title="Updates">

      <Release id="1" version="test" added="" fixed="" live="true" autoupdate="true" createdAt="2014-03-16T01:57:11+00:00">
        <Package file="https://github.com/RasPlex/RasPlex/releases/download/test/RasPlex-test.tar.gz" fileHash="sumthing" fileName="RasPlex-test.tar.gz" delta="false"/>
      </Release>

  </MediaContainer>

/install

Returns a json document with the following structure:

 [
  {
    "id": 1,
    "install_url": "https://github.com/RasPlex/RasPlex/releases/download/test/RasPlex-test.img.gz",
    "install_sum": "a823d770a0ccfefe0a04b34c677e6bf8",
    "update_url": "https://github.com/RasPlex/RasPlex/releases/download/test/RasPlex-test.tar.gz",
    "update_sum": "sumthing",
    "version": "test",
    "autoupdate": true,
    "time": "2014-03-16T01:57:11+00:00",
    "notes": "A change\nAnother change"
  }
]

Where each element in the list is a release, and there are actual checksum, etc.

/

Just returns "pong", indicating te service is running.

Creating a release

The github release should be created against the desired tag, and the update and install archives should be added to the release.

Note that the suffixes are very important, as they differentiate the update from the install archive.

The body of the release should be a well-formed yaml file of the following format:

  channel: [stable|prerelease|beta]

  changes:
    - A change
    - Another change

  install:

    - file: RasPlex-test.img.gz
    - md5sum: a823d770a0ccfefe0a04b34c677e6bf8
    - url: an option URL to where this image is hosted

  update:

    - file: RasPlex-test.tar.gz
    - shasum: sumthing
    - url: an option URL to where this image is hosted

Note that the spacing after each section is important, so that github will also interpret it as a markdown file and display it properly to users visiting the releases page.

System setup

Just clone and npm install should be enough, you must have nodejs and npm install and reasonably new.

Mysql setup (only needed for production, defaults to sqlite)

Replace with appropriate values

  create database rasplex\_updater;
  grant all on rasplex\_updater.\* to 'updater'@'localhost' identified by 'updater';

Runit setup

This is a bit annoying to find in the docs, so it's documented here. After installing runit via your package manager do:

• Copy the included "runit/rasbot" folder into /etc/sv/rasbot
• Link your getty from /etc/sv to /etc/supervise
• ln -s /etc/sv/getty-X /etc/service
• Link your service directory to the service folder
• ln -s /etc/sv/rasbot /etc/service
• Fix permissions to allow deploy user to restart:
• chmod 755 /etc/sv/rasbot/supervise
• chown deploy /etc/sv/rasbot/supervise/ok /etc/sv/rasbot/supervise/status /etc/sv/rasbot/supervise/control

Deploying

You must have your public key added to the deploy users. Then you should just be able to do:

 bundle exec cap production deploy

Which will push the new code out, and restart the runit service to use the new code.