Release containing multiple artifacts!

General Discussions
1

Hello ,

Am looking for more information how to create release contain more artifacts .

Deployment

A Deployment ensures the delivery of a Release to one or more devices. A Release can contain one or more Mender Artifacts . The Artifact is assigned to a device based on the software and hardware compatibility the device provides. In other words, a Deployment is the server-side model which represents a device update.

Thanks,
sudheer.

2

Hi @sudheermygapula,

Thanks for reaching out! It seems that you are accidentally mixing up two concepts where multiple entities of something are involved.

A Release, as quoted, can contain one or more Mender Artifacts. Those do not stack or combine though, it’s a mechanism to deploy to a variety of devices.
Example: you have a homogenous fleet of device types device_A, device_B and device_C, which you want to update in one deployment. So you create a set of semantically equivalent artifacts with the same MENDER_ARTIFACT_NAME, but different compatible devices. Once up upload those, they get bundled into a release, which can then be used in a single deployment.

An Artifact does not have a built-in mechanism for handling multiple payloads (yet). This can be solved somewhat easily by crafting an Update Module which can process multiple contained payloads though. Through proper setting of provides and depends, this can then be partially updated too. So if you need to ship, lets say, an OS plus an additional application, the route would be to create an Update Module which, based on the rootfs-image one, installs the additional payload accordingly before rebooting.

Greetz,
Josef

3

Thanks for quick reply , the first part is clear now !

Regarding second point :

I see that issue is still open Jira , any plans this feature will be availble in future release .

Can you point to me if there any update module ( Community or internally from mender ) for reference ?

Thanks,
sudheer.

4

Hi @sudheermygapula,

You can find the Update Module examples at GitHub - mendersoftware/mender-update-modules: Community-supported Update Modules for the Mender client. I don’t think there is a combined one yet.

Currently I am not aware of the multi-artifact handling being actively worked on, so the handling as a custom Update Module is definitely the way to go.

Greetz,
Josef