external updater is a tool to automatically update libraries in external/.
The documentation on this page is for users of external_updater. If you're looking for developer docs, see docs/dev.md.
In each of the examples below, $PROJECT_PATH is the path to the project to operate on. If more than one path is given, external_updater will operate on each in turn.
Note: Older versions of external_updater used a different path resolution method. Relative paths were resolved relative to //external rather than the CWD, which meant tab-completed paths would only work if the CWD was //external, and that wildcards had to be escaped for processing by external_updater rather than the shell (e.g. updater.sh 'check rust/crates/*'). That behavior was removed to support CWD relative paths. If you want the old behavior back, leave a comment on http://b/243685332 or https://r.android.com/2855445.
Check updates for a library or verify METADATA is valid:
tools/external_updater/updater.sh check $PROJECT_PATH
Update a library, commit, and upload the change to Gerrit:
tools/external_updater/updater.sh update $PROJECT_PATH
Update a library without committing and uploading to Gerrit:
tools/external_updater/updater.sh update --no-upload $PROJECT_PATH
Update a library on top of the local changes in the current branch, commit, and upload the change to Gerrit:
tools/external_updater/updater.sh update --keep-local-changes $PROJECT_PATH
Update a library without building:
tools/external_updater/updater.sh update --no-build $PROJECT_PATH
LIBNAME can be the path to a library under external/, e.g. kotlinc, or python/cpython3.
To use this tool, a METADATA file must present at the root of the repository. The full definition can be found here. Or see example here
The most important part in the file is a list of urls. external_updater will go through all urls and uses the first supported url.
If type of a URL is set to GIT, the URL must be a git upstream (the one you can use with git clone). And the version field must be either a version tag, or SHA. The tool will find the latest version tag or sha based on it.
When upgrade, the tool will simply run git merge tag/sha.
IMPORTANT: It is suggested to set up a upstream-main branch to replicate upstream. Because most users don't have the privilege to upload changes not authored by themselves. This can be done by filing a bug to componentid:99104.
If the version is a SHA, the tool will always try to upgrade to the top of upstream. As long as there is any new change upstream, local library will be treated as stale.
If the version is not a SHA, the tool will try to parse the version to get a numbered version. Currently the supported version format is:
<prefix><version_number><suffix>
version_number part can be numbers separated by . or - or _.
If you have project where this isn't working, file a bug so we can take a look.
It is suggested to verify all local changes when upgrading. This can be done easily in Gerrit, by comparing parent2 and the patchset.
If the url type is ARCHIVE, and the url is from GitHub, external_updater can upgrade a library based on GitHub releases.
If you have the choice between archives and git tags, choose tags. Because that makes it easier to manage local changes.
The tool will query GitHub to get the latest release from:
https://github.com/user/proj/releases/latest
If the tag of latest release is not equal to version in METADATA file, a new version is found. The tool will download the tarball and overwrite the library with it.
If there are multiple archives in one GitHub release, the one most similar to previous (from METADATA) will be used.
After upgrade, files not present in the new tarball will be removed. But we explicitly keep files famous in Android tree. See here.
If more files need to be reserved, a post_update.sh can be created to copy these files over. See example.
Local patches can be kept as patches/*.diff. They will be applied after upgrade. example
There is some support to automatically check updates for all external libraries every hour, send email and change. Currently this is done by running the following script on a desktop machine.
#!/bin/bash cd /src/aosp while true do repo abandon tmp_auto_upgrade repo forall -c git checkout . repo forall -c git clean -xdf repo sync -c source build/envsetup.sh lunch aosp_arm-eng mmma tools/external_updater out/soong/host/linux-x86/bin/external_updater_notifier \ --history ~/updater/history \ --recipients=android_external_lib_updates@google.com \ --generate_change \ --all date echo "Sleeping..." sleep 3600 done