Automatic update options

[PaulCormier]

My organization is set up to use a corporate HTTP proxy (with basic auth) when accessing the internet. Even when entering the full http://user_id:password@http-proxy:port information in the settings panel, I am unable to connect to check for updates. Further to that, I cannot connect to my localhost anymore (presumably because the http requests are being sent to the proxy).

Even if I could configure WRC to use the proxy correctly (including proxy-bypass URL patterns), not everyone in the organization has permission to download through the proxy, and we would prefer to update our software through other means. We are also disinclined to use software which "phones home" or otherwise tries to connect out to the internet.

At the very least, I would like an option to disable the automatic update check.

The best I've been able to come up with is editing resources/app-update.yml, changing the provider to generic and setting the URL to an internal location where I have a copy of the latest.yml file hosted. I presume that those setting will get overridden if/when I upgrade WRC next, so it's not a permanent solution.

[TheFrogPad]

Thanks for the input, we will look into adding an auto updater option that would disable the software update checks completely.

As for the proxy handling, we will also check on the specifics of that configuration w.r.t. the updater since the current setting would impact the connections to WebLogic and there is also a proxy override option in the admin server connection dialog.

[lfeigen]

We have added a Preference to not check for updates. Making Electron use your configured proxy is turning out to be a little complex, but I'll leave the issue for when we nail it.

[PaulCormier]

Thank you.
🫤 Any chance can script turning that option off? We'd like to install this on a lot of computers, and we'd rather not ask to have each user turn it off on their own.

[lfeigen]

Well, there's no magic here. There's a user-prefs.json file placed in the user's config directory (see references in here https://oracle.github.io/weblogic-remote-console/troubleshoot-weblogic-remote-console/) and this element tells the application not to check:

{ "startup": {
"checkForUpdates": false
}
}

[PaulCormier]

Marvelous! Thank you.

[kenneth-olwing]

I would like to echo the sentiments overall - "phone home" software is not appreciated by our security team (govt entity) and even if users could download we really don't want users to upgrade/install tools at will. However, the suggested solution is not adequate I'm afraid.

We are generally distributing/deploying tools by internal means, after vetting. But since it's a user level config it's still at the users discretion to change it, defeating our policy. Further, this approach of changing user-prefs.json automatically won't really work since at the moment of installation it's not known which user(s) file to modify as it's done by centralized installation push software using an admin level acct (Windows) or root or similar using rpm (Linux) to a write-protected location.

Hence, I would request any settings such as these to be controlled by a installation-level preference file that allows us to effectively disallow the checkForUpdates regardless of user setting.

[lfeigen]

I'm going to close this issue to be clear that something was fixed. Then I'm going to open two other issues, one to support proxy for automatic update (as Paul would like) check and one to support a mechanism for everybody on a team to share settings (as Kenneth would like).

Issues 80 and 81 have been created.