Are electron-builder artifacts necessary in a repo?

Question

When publishing a build using electron-builder, a number of artifacts are created in GitHub releases in addition to .zip, .dmg, etc files:

latest-mac.json
latest-mac.yml
<app>.dmg.blockmap

Are these necessary for future auto-update detection? Is there a reason to suppress them?

Answer 1

These files are used to check for Blockmap attributes, version, SHA check and also if your app is for multiple OS System.

Depending if you use Pre-release and Release it can also provide specific point for an user install beta or final release.

If your check electron-builder docs you will see:

• zip target for macOS is required for Squirrel.Mac, otherwise latest-mac.yml cannot be created, which causes autoUpdater error. Default target for macOS is dmg+zip, so there is no need to explicitly specify target.

• Staged rollouts are controlled by manually editing your latest.yml / latest-mac.yml (channel update info file).

• latest.yml (or latest-mac.yml for macOS, or latest-linux.yml for Linux) will be generated and uploaded for all providers except bintray (because not required, bintray doesn't use latest.yml).

So, it's good to keep these files in your artifact release.