Autoupdating AIR apps on Linux without prompting for sudo password

Question

Hey there overflowers,

Maybe that's more of a Linux question than an Adobe Air one, but there you go: I have an AIR 2 app that does auto-update in the background, with no need for user interaction. It uses Air's own ApplicationUpdater framework (the one that doesn't require a UI) - all goes well until the package gets downloaded and needs to be installed - at that point, the Air Installer prompts for SUDO password and won't proceed without some user interaction.

Is there any way to circumvent/avoid that?

Answer 1

You could do that by rolling your own updating mechanism. Is not really that difficult, if you plan it correctly you don't even need to close the app.

We did so for an internal project, where we use git. Since I guess you can't rely on Git being available on the user's machine, you could check out the server, download a zip file, uncompress it and replace the contents of your app.

AIR doesn't sign or checksum the files it installs, you can safely replace them and re-load the app without problems.

HTH,

J