Auto-update Zed code editor

I recently discovered the Zed code editor and became so interested in it that I decided to switch to it. When the stable version for Linux was released the other day, I realized that it was time to act. Much to my disappointment, most Linux package managers have an older version of Zed available than the one presented on official websiteso I have to update the application manually. So I came up with the idea of ​​creating a program that would automatically update Zed for me. For this, I decided to use the Golang programming language.

Checking the current version

You can check the editor version with the command zed --version .

This command needs to be run during our program execution. I created a global variable availableVersionwhich will store the current version of the program, and a function that takes a command and its arguments, then extracts the version from the output and writes it to a variable availableVersion. After this you can use the variable availableVersion to compare the current version of the program with the latest available version.

var availableVersion string = ""
func execute(cmd string, arg ...string) {

	out, err := exec.Command(cmd, arg[0]).Output()

	if err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}
	output := string(out[:])

	availableVersion = getVersionFromString(output, 4)
}

Function getVersionFromString takes a string and the index of the element to start processing from, and returns a minor version.

func getVersionFromString(target string, start int) string {
	var version string = ""
	for i, c := start, 0; i < len(target); i++ {
		if target[i] == '.' {
			c++
		}
		if c < 2 {
			version += string(target[i])
		}
	}
	return version
}

Getting the latest version

In order to check the current released version, I check the release version on Github. You can check the latest release version using a link of this type https://api.github.com/repos/owner/repo/releases/latest.

Then I created another global variable targetVersionwhich should store the current version, and the getActualVersion function, which receives json with the current version, extracts it and writes it to a variable.

var targetVersion string = ""
func getActualVersion() {
	resp, err := http.Get("https://api.github.com/repos/zed-industries/zed/releases/latest")

	if err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}
	defer resp.Body.Close()
	body, err := io.ReadAll(resp.Body)
  
	rm := make(map[string]json.RawMessage)

	err = json.Unmarshal(body, &rm)

	if err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}

	targetVersion = getVersionFromString(string(rm["tag_name"]), 2)
}

Comparison of versions

All that remains is to compare the versions, and if they do not match, run the installation/update script with official website.

func main() {
	execute("zed", "--version")
	getActualVersion()

	if availableVersion != targetVersion {
		execute("curl https://zed.dev/install.sh | sh")
		fmt.Println("\n\n\nSuccessfully update")
	} else {
		fmt.Println("The versions match")
	}
}

Adding to crontab

In order for everything to be fully automated, the program needs to be compiled. go build main.go and add the executable file to crontab.

Summary

I wrote a simple Go script that checks for updates to the Zed code editor once a week and installs them if there are any. You can see the full code on my Github. I hope this article was helpful. All the best!