cuihaoleo / nvchecker

New version checker for software

nvchecker (short for new version checker) is for checking if a new version of some software has been released.

Dependency

• Python 3
• Tornado
• Optional pycurl
• All commands used in your version source files

Running

To see available options:

./nvchecker --help

Run with one or more software version source files:

./nvchecker source_file

You normally will like to specify some "version record files"; see below.

Version Record Files

Version record files record which version of the software you know or is available. They are simple key-value pairs of (name, version) seperated by a space[v0.3]:

fcitx 4.2.7
google-chrome 27.0.1453.93-200836
vim 7.3.1024

Say you've got a version record file called old_ver.txt which records all your watched software and their versions, as well as some configuration entries. To update it using nvchecker:

./nvchecker source.ini

See what are updated with nvcmp:

./nvcmp source.ini

Manually compare the two files for updates (assuming they are sorted alphabetically; files generated by nvchecker are already sorted):

comm -13 old_ver.txt new_ver.txt
# or say that in English:
comm -13 old_ver.txt new_ver.txt | awk '{print $1 " has updated to version " $2 "."}'
# show both old and new versions
join old_ver.txt new_ver.txt | awk '$2 != $3'

The nvtake Command

This command helps to manage version record files. It reads both old and new version record files, and a list of names given on the commandline. It then update the versions of those names in the old version record file.

This helps when you have known (and processed) some of the updated software, but not all. You can tell nvchecker that via this command instead of editing the file by hand.

This command will help most if you specify where you version record files are in your config file. See below for how to use a config file.

Version Source Files

The software version source files are in ini format. Section names is the name of the software. Following fields are used to tell nvchecker how to determine the current version of that software.

See sample_source.ini for an example.

Configuration Section

A special section named __config__ is special, it provides some configuration options[v0.4].

Relative path are relative to the source files, and ~ and environmental variables are expanded.

Currently supported options are:

oldver

Specify a version record file containing the old version info.

newver

Specify a version record file to storing the new version info.

Search in a Webpage

Search through a specific webpage for the version string. This type of version finding has these fields:

url

The URL of the webpage to fetch.

encoding

(Optional) The character encoding of the webpage, if latin1 is not appropriate.

regex

A regular expression used to find the version string.

It can have zero or one capture group. The capture group or the whole match is the version string.

When multiple version strings are found, the maximum of those is chosen.

proxy

The HTTP proxy to use. The format is host:port, e.g. localhost:8087. This requires pycurl.

user_agent

The User-Agent header value to use. Use something more like a tool (e.g. curl/7.40.0) in Europe or the real web page won't get through because cookie policies (SourceForge has this issue).

Find with a Command

Use a shell command line to get the version. The output is striped first, so trailing newlines do not bother.

cmd

The command line to use. This will run with the system's standard shell (i.e. /bin/sh).

Check AUR

Check Arch User Repository for updates.

aur

The package name in AUR. If empty, use the name of software (the section name).

Check GitHub

Check GitHub for updates. The version returned is in date format %Y%m%d, e.g. 20130701.

github

The github repository, with author, e.g. lilydjwg/nvchecker.

branch

Which branch to track? Default: master.

An environment variable NVCHECKER_GITHUB_TOKEN can be set to a GitHub OAuth token in order to request more frequently than anonymously.

Check BitBucket

Check BitBucket for updates. The version returned is in date format %Y%m%d, e.g. 20130701.

bitbucket

The bitbucket repository, with author, e.g. lilydjwg/dotvim.

branch

Which branch to track? Default is the repository's default.

Check GitCafe

Check GitCafe for updates. The version returned is in date format %Y%m%d, e.g. 20130701.

gitcafe

The gitcafe repository, with author, e.g. Deepin/deepin-music.

branch

Which branch to track? Default: master.

Anonymously only. Authorization is not supported yet.

Check PyPI

Check PyPI for updates.

pypi

The name used on PyPI, e.g. PySide.

Check RubyGems

Check RubyGems for updates.

gems

The name used on RubyGems, e.g. sass.

Check Local Pacman Database

This is used when you run nvchecker on an Arch Linux system and the program always keeps up with a package in your configured repositories for Pacman.

pacman

The package name to reference to.

Check Arch Linux official packages

This enables you to track the update of Arch Linux official packages, without needing of pacman and an updated local Pacman databases.

archpkg

Name of the Arch Linux package.

Check Google Code (hg repository)

Check a mercurial (hg) repository on Google Code for updates. The version returned is in date format %Y%m%d, e.g. 20130701.

gcode_hg

The name used on Google Code, e.g. chromium-compact-language-detector.

Check Google Code (svn repository)

Check a subversion (svn) repository on Google Code for updates. The version returned is the svn resivion number.

gcode_svn

The name used on Google Code, e.g. cld2.

Manually updating

This enables you to manually specify the version (maybe because you want to approve each release before it gets to the script).

manual

The version string.

Version Control System (VCS) (git, hg, svn, bzr)

Check a VCS repo for new commits. The version returned is currently not related to the version of the software and will increase whenever the referred VCS branch changes. This is mainly for Arch Linux.

vcs

The url of the remote VCS repo, using the same syntax with a VCS url in PKGBUILD (Pacman's build script). The first VCS url found in the source array of the PKGBUILD will be used if this is left blank. (Note: for a blank vcs setting to work correctly, the PKGBUILD has to be in a directory with the name of the software under the path where nvchecker is run. Also, all the commands, if any, needed when sourcing the PKGBUILD need to be installed).

Other

More to come. Send me a patch or pull request if you can't wait and have written one yourself :-)

Bugs

• Finish writing results even on Ctrl-C or other interruption.

TODO

• Support GitHub tags

Footnotes

[v0.3]

Note: with nvchecker <= 0.2, there are one more colon each line. You can use sed -i 's/://' FILES... to remove them.

[v0.4]

This is added in version 0.4, and old command-line options are removed.