System OTA for Linux Gateways

System OTA is a robust, unattended update system for Linux Gateways, suitable for home automation gateways and other devices where reliability is paramount.

OSTC Forum

This component is being designed and discussed on the OSTC Forum https://forum.ostc-eu.org/t/over-the-air-updates-ota/28/

Development

This is a standard go project. Use go get git.ostc-eu.org/OSTC/OHOS/components/sysota to get it. Once in the resulting directory under $GOPATH, typically ~/go/src/git.ostc-eu.org/OSTC/OHOS/components/sysota run go test ./... to run unit tests. There are no integration tests yet.

To try the service out in practice you may want to do this though:

make configure
./configure --prefix=/usr
make
sudo make install
sudo systemctl enable sysotad.service

As you iterate you may need to refresh in-memory definition of systemd unit files:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload

To remove what you've installed run the uninstall target:

sudo make uninstall

Remember that uninstall is stateless, if you want to rename a file, first uninstall, then rename and finally install again.

Testing

The project has a combination of unit tests, available through the standard go interface, and integration tests implemented with spread.

To execute unit tests run:

go test ./...

To execute integration tests you will need a working installation of spread and lxd or qemu. Currently LXD is preferred, as it is faster and easier to configure correctly. GitLab CI uses qemu as LXD cannot be used from a docker container. For more information on how to prepare a test environment with qemu, refer to the spread-image-hirsute job defined in .gitlab-ci.yml.

A compatible build of spread is available from the Ubuntu PPA ppa:zyga/oh-tools. It can be also compiled from sources at https://git.ostc-eu.org/OSTC/tools/oh-spread/.

LXD is available as a snap package. Install it with sudo snap install lxd and then initialize it with sudo lxd init --auto.

To execute integration tests run:

spread -v lxd:

You may want to pass some options to spread, namely -reuse -resend to speed up subsequent runs by keeping the ephemeral container with all the build dependencies and cache around.

Packaging

While there is no official packaging yet, the build system does support the standard configure --prefix=/usr && make && sudo make install combo.

You may want to enable the sysotad.service systemd unit after installation.