Updating Rotonde in Beaker Browser
Note: This guide is out-of-date, and is now deprecated. New installs of Rotonde are self-updating.
Rotonde for Beaker Browser is updating at an incredibly fast rate. With new features going out every few hours, keeping your feed up-to-date with the development repository becomes a daily routine.
You don't need to constantly update your Rotonde app, things will continue to work even without the latest features, but as Rotonde & Beaker Browser sit on the bleeding edge, bugfixes in particular will help make your experience more enjoyable.
There are plans to make Rotonde for Beaker self-updating, but in the meantime, we have to update things ourselves.
If you followed my setup guide, you may have a basic familiarity with using git on the command line. This is what we used to download Rotonde for Beaker initially, and we can use git to keep our codebase up-to-date as well.
Note
During this guide, you will be modifying your Rotonde app's directory. As a precaution, you should duplicate this folder each time you perform an update.
If things go awry and break, you can always wipe the modified folder, and replace it with the one you just duplicated.
Stashing your changes
As Rotonde for Beaker is a self-contained application, when you make changes to your feed, either by changing its .css stylesheets, or creating new posts, you are directly modifying the application's files.
In order to receive the latest updates, you need to make sure that you "stash" the changes you've already made into git, and apply them back on top of your code after you download the latest updates.
Navigate to your Rotonde application directory in your terminal using cd, and then run the following command:
> git stash
Downloading the latest updates
Now that your changes have been stashed away into git, you can now pull down the latest version of Rotonde for Beaker, using the following command:
> git pull
This will pull down all of the latest changes from GitHub since you initially downloaded/last updated the app.
Apply your previous changes
You now need to apply the changes you stashed before updating back on top of the code you just received.
You can do this by running the following command:
> git stash pop
Fixing conflicts
In some circumstances, code you modify yourself may clash or "conflict" with new updates you receive from a repository.
git will notify you in your terminal after running git stash pop which files are conflicting. You can then open these files in your code editor, and fix any conflicts by hand.
(Note: your code editor may handle git conflicts in its own unique way. I am using Atom in the following screenshot. It has its own fancy git mode.)
Finishing up
Your feed should now be up-to-date with the latest version of Rotonde for Beaker.
As mentioned earlier, there are plans to make Rotonde feeds in Beaker self-updating. Until then, I've found this to be the simplest way of keeping your feed up-to-date.
If you have suggestions on how to improve this guide, I always appreciate feedback. You can reach me via the following:
- Rotonde (@louis)
- Twitter (@louiscenter)