Option to update the device agent automatically to the latest version

[robmarcer]

Description

As a FlowForge user who is managing a lot of devices updating the device agent version is time consuming.

It would be useful to be able to configure my devices to auto update when a new version is released without me having to SSH to each one.

[knolleary]

If the device is happily running flows, how does it decide when to update? That could cause unexpected/unplanned outages driven purely based on when we happen to publish updates.

If the requirement is to make it easier to update the device agent without having to login to the device, then one approach would be to add the ability to update the device agent via the FF Platform dashboard - all part of the remote management of the device.

There is lots of room for feature enhancements to the existing snapshot management. One of the things that was mentioned was being able to schedule when a snapshot gets deployed. Being able to set a schedule for updating the device agent would very much fall under the same sort of functionality.

[robmarcer]

Being able to update from the FlowForge devices interface would be ideal and should be worked towards, totally agreed.

I think that some device users will be happy with the device agent updating automatically, being that those Node-RED instances will be used for collation of sensor data only. Assuming they can opt out of the updates if they wish to.

I'm assuming that to be able to update the device agent version from the FlowForge device interface we will first need the coding in place for the device agent to deal with the update locally, in a robust manner.

I wondered if a step towards managing the remote updates was to allow users to pick from 'don't update' or 'update as soon as a new version of the device agent is available' via a local config file, we could then iterate on that by allowing control of the device updates from FlowForge.

I suppose we could also allow the user to nominate a time of day to update after a new version is released.