Automatic Updates
The UMAI Engine keeps itself up to date. You never need to download a new installer or reinstall the engine by hand, and you are never asked to approve an update.
When updates happen
There are two moments when the engine looks for a newer version.
Every time the engine starts. Before the engine comes up, it checks for a newer version and installs one if it finds it. On a brand new install you will see a progress window while the engine downloads for the first time.
Every 30 minutes while the engine is running. If a new version is available, the engine downloads it in the background while you carry on working, then waits for a quiet moment to install it.
What counts as a quiet moment
An update is only installed when all of these are true:
- No test execution, recording, or other engine task is running
- The engine is idle, with nothing in flight from the website
- No scheduled execution is due within the next 30 minutes
If any of them is false, the engine waits and checks again every 30 seconds. An update will never interrupt a test run, a recording, or a schedule that is about to start.
What you will see
When the quiet moment arrives, the engine reports itself as updating, restarts, and comes back ready. The download has already finished by this point, so this usually takes a few seconds.
While it is updating, actions such as starting a test run or a recording are unavailable. They become available again as soon as the engine is back.
Nothing is required from you at any point.
If an update goes wrong
Every download is verified before it is installed. If a new version then fails to start correctly, the engine automatically puts back the version you were running and starts that instead. A version that fails repeatedly is blocked and will not be tried again.
On Linux, that verification checks each download against useMango's signing key. The same check is available to you by hand for the installer you download from the website, see Verifying Your Download.
In short, a bad update leaves you on your last working version rather than on a broken one.
Turning automatic updates off
We strongly recommend leaving automatic updates on
Updates are designed to stay out of your way: they only install while the engine is idle, they never interrupt a run or an imminent schedule, and they roll themselves back if anything goes wrong. Running an old engine means missing fixes and improvements, and the useMango AI website expects a current engine, so an out of date engine can stop working with it.
Automatic updates are controlled by a single setting in your user_preferences.toml file:
auto_update_enabled = false
The engine creates this file for you the first time it runs, in its data directory:
| Operating system | Location |
|---|---|
| Windows | %LOCALAPPDATA%\umai\data\user_preferences.toml |
| macOS | ~/Library/Application Support/umai/data/user_preferences.toml |
| Linux | ~/.local/share/umai/data/user_preferences.toml |
Set the value to false and restart the engine for the change to take effect. Set it back to
true, or delete the line, to turn updates back on.
What this setting does
With it turned off, nothing checks for a new version: not the periodic check while the engine is running, and not the check that normally happens as the engine starts. Your engine stays on the version it is on until you turn the setting back on.
The one exception is a brand new installation. If no engine version is installed yet, the first version is always downloaded, because otherwise there would be nothing to run.