Add electron updater

[pierremtb]

No description provided.

[pierremtb]

https://www.electronforge.io/advanced/auto-update

and

https://www.electronforge.io/config/publishers/gcs

seem relevant to us here

[pierremtb]

Good bits on the underlying apis at https://www.codejam.info/2024/05/how-to-use-electron-auto-updater.html

[pierremtb]

https://github.com/KittyCAD/modeling-app/actions/runs/10468905251/job/28991462449 got all required artifacts out to the GCS bucket (under test/electron). Now on to testing the auto updater

[pierremtb]

@jessfraz Back to this issue for a general write up of the current state of affairs:

1. To make the tauri updater work with our electron bundles, we need to make them available as .msi.tar.gz and .app.tar.gz archives on the bucket (easy, just unzip and tar), and more importantly manually generate a signature for them using the key pair we had set up for that for tauri. The tauri rust code is at https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri/blob/fd68b7fdea3890d9f0a373a252a3682bd9d04138/tooling/cli/src/bundle.rs#L284, would seem reasonable to write and run a dumbed down version of that to manually generate that signature (not too concerning but haven't started on that yet).
2. The default update-electron-app tool used for electron and forge only supports .exe from Squirrel I believe as per https://github.com/electron/update-electron-app?tab=readme-ov-file#what-kinds-of-assets-do-i-need-to-build. Which is a big blow. I do not see a path to get MSI to work here with this, at least in the short term.
   • One workaround I can think of: I've seen a lot of recommendations online for electron-builder instead of forge for packaging. Turns out their support for auto-updates is different than the default electron one, in a way that's more in line with what tauri was doing, and works with DMG for macOS, AppImage/DEB/RPM for Linux, and NSIS for Windows. While this wouldn't solve the problem directly as we're currently configured for MSI on tauri, we could try to migrate Windows users to NSIS first, just like in this tauri ticket, and then make the jump to Electron using the strategy in 1 but with .nsis.tar.gz and the corresponding signature. NSIS in tauri also seems to support file associations.
   • Another completely different approach for us could be to rely on app stores only, forge supports AppX for the Microsoft Store, and we figured out Mac App Store in the past so it shouldn't be a huge deal to get the electron app in. This would remove any need for auto-updates, the migration strategy would be just a deprecation notice and a link to download the app from the store. I think the biggest limitation here would be entreprise customers with limited or completely blocked access to the Microsoft Store. So maybe more like a last resort or big pivot option.

I will start looking at electron-builder more to see if it could be an option.

[lf94]

@pierremtb Jess added "MakerWix" which produces msi files. It could help.

[pierremtb]

@lf94 Yes but auto-updates don't work with these unfortunately. Only Squirrel