Custom Update Agents

This section shows how to create a custom update agent, “SOTA client” for your platform. aktualizr-lite is a general purpose SOTA client that fits many needs. However, some types of products require more control over the update agent than aktualizr-lite and it’s “hooks” system provides. In these cases, a custom SOTA client can be written in C++ using the aktualizr-lite API.

Using the custom-sota-client Example

We provide a SOTA client example in aktualizr-lite that serves as a great starting place to experiment. The meta-lmp layer includes a recipe that runs this example as the default SOTA client. Later, this serves as an example to copy/paste into a Factory specific recipe.

Users can build this custom client into their LmP image with a small addition to meta-subscriber-overrides.git:

git clone -b devel https://source.foundries.io/factories/<factory>/meta-subscriber-overrides.git
cd meta-subscriber-overrides
echo 'SOTA_CLIENT = "custom-sota-client"' >> conf/machine/include/lmp-factory-custom.inc

Forking the custom-sota-client

Producing a factory-specific SOTA client can be done by:

1. Creating a Git repository for your custom code. Copying the examples/custom-client-cxx directory is a good place to start.
2. Copying the custom-sota-client recipe from meta-lmp into meta-subscriber-overrides/recipes-sota.
3. Changing the custom-sota-client_git.bb Git references (SRC_URI, BRANCH, SRCREV) to point at your new sources.