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How to gradually roll out Capacitor Live Updates

Live Updates are a powerful feature that allows you to deliver updates to your Capacitor app in real-time without having to resubmit your app to the app stores. In order to ensure a smooth rollout of updates, it is recommended to gradually roll out updates to your users. This way you can minimize potential issues and collect feedback from a smaller group of users before rolling out the update to all users.

Introduction

In this guide, we will show you how to gradually roll out updates to your users using the Capawesome Cloud. First, we will roll out a new bundle to a small percentage of users and then gradually increase the percentage of users that receive the update. For this, we will use the Capawesome CLI.

Create a bundle

To create a new bundle, you need to use the apps:bundles:create command of the Capawesome CLI. Once the bundle is created, it is immediately available to all users. To roll out the bundle to only 10% of users, for example, you can use the --rollout option:

npx capawesome apps:bundles:create --rollout 0.1

Note that the --rollout option accepts a value between 0 and 1, where 0 means that the bundle is not rolled out to any users and 1 means that the bundle is rolled out to all users.

Update a bundle

To update an existing bundle, you can use the apps:bundles:update command of the Capawesome CLI. In order to gradually increase the percentage of users that receive the update, you can use the --rollout option again:

npx capawesome apps:bundles:update --rollout 0.3

In this example, the bundle is now rolled out to 30% of users. You can always see the current rollout percentage of a bundle in the Capawesome Cloud Console.

Limitations

Please note that rollouts are currently not compatible with Versioned Builds. We therefore recommend the use of Version Channels for this purpose.

Conclusion

By gradually rolling out updates to your users, you can minimize potential issues and father valuable feedback from your users. If you have any questions, just create a discussion in the GitHub repository. Make sure you follow Capawesome on X so you don't miss any future updates.