Live Updates for Nuxt Capacitor Apps with Capawesome Cloud¶

Live Updates, also known as Over-the-Air (OTA) or hot code updates, are a way to push updates to your Android or iOS app without going through the app store review process. This is particularly useful for fixing bugs, adding new features, or making changes to your app without requiring users to download a new version from the app store. For this, we will use the Capacitor Live Update plugin from Capawesome in combination with Capawesome Cloud.

Installation¶

To enable Live Updates in your Capacitor app, you need to install the @capawesome/capacitor-live-update plugin:

npm install @capawesome/capacitor-live-update

After that, you need to sync the changes with your native projects:

npx cap sync

Configuration¶

Next, you need to configure the plugin to work with Capawesome Cloud.

App ID¶

In order for your app to identify itself to Capawesome Cloud, you need to set the appId in your capacitor.config file. For this, you need to create an app on the Capawesome Cloud Console and get the App ID.

{
  "plugins": {
    "LiveUpdate": {
      "appId": "00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000"
    }
  }
}

Replace 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 with your actual App ID from the Capawesome Cloud Console.

After configuring the App ID, sync your Capacitor project again:

npx cap sync

Usage¶

The most basic usage of the Live Update plugin is to call the sync(...) method when the app starts. This method checks for updates, downloads them if available, and sets them as the next bundle to be applied. You can then call the reload() method to apply the update immediately. If the reload() method is not called, the new bundle will be used on the next app start.

import { LiveUpdate } from "@capawesome/capacitor-live-update"

const sync = async () => {
  const result = await LiveUpdate.sync()
  if (result.nextBundleId) {
    await LiveUpdate.reload()
  }
}

Publishing updates¶

To publish your first update, you need to create a bundle on Capawesome Cloud. For this, you need a bundle artifact. A bundle artifact is the build output of your web app. In Nuxt, this is the dist folder. You can create a bundle artifact by running the following command:

npx nuxi generate

This will create a dist folder with the build output of your web app. You can then upload this folder to Capawesome Cloud using the Capawesome CLI. To install the Capawesome CLI, run the following command:

npm i -g @capawesome/cli

After installing the Capawesome CLI, you need to log in to your Capawesome Cloud account. Run the following command and follow the instructions:

npx capawesome login

Once you are logged in, you can create a bundle by running the following command:

npx capawesome apps:bundles:create --path dist

Congratulations! You have successfully published your first live update. You can now test it by running your app on a device or emulator. The app will check for updates and apply them if available. Feel free to check out the documentation of the Live Update plugin to see what else you can do with it.