Never thought I'd see someone link to one of my projects!
As others have pointed out, it's not a perfect solution and has a limited scope of use. I originally made this as an experiment to make it easy to distribute updates for cli apps that I was working on. Yes, a package manager is the "right" way to do this, but since I was testing and building images in my CI flow (using https://github.com/japaric/trust) I wanted a way to take advantage of that pipeline in a seamless way. The library exposes a couple predefined "backends" that handle common patterns like GitHub releases and s3, but the underlying steps (downloading, extracting, replacing) are also made available so you can build your own update pattern and add things like verification.
As others have pointed out, it's not a perfect solution and has a limited scope of use. I originally made this as an experiment to make it easy to distribute updates for cli apps that I was working on. Yes, a package manager is the "right" way to do this, but since I was testing and building images in my CI flow (using https://github.com/japaric/trust) I wanted a way to take advantage of that pipeline in a seamless way. The library exposes a couple predefined "backends" that handle common patterns like GitHub releases and s3, but the underlying steps (downloading, extracting, replacing) are also made available so you can build your own update pattern and add things like verification.