Update Notifier plugin for Craft CMS

Plugin to let you know if your CMS/plugins need updated from your own external tools, without having to log in to your dashboard., _(*1)

Installation

To install Update Notifier, follow these steps:, _(*2)

Download & unzip the file and place the updatenotifier directory into your craft/plugins directory
-OR- do a git clone https://github.com/fortytwostudio/updatenotifier.git directly into your craft/plugins folder. You can then update it with git pull
-OR- install with Composer via composer require fortytwostudio/updatenotifier
Install plugin in the Craft Control Panel under Settings > Plugins
The plugin folder should be named updatenotifier for Craft to see it. GitHub recently started appending -master (the branch name) to the name of the folder for zip file downloads.

Update Notifier works on Craft 2.4.x and Craft 2.5.x., _(*3)

Update Notifier Overview

This plugin allows you to check if your Craft CMS install (and plugins) have pending updates, without having to log in to your dashboard., _(*4)

Configuring Update Notifier

There are a couple of settings you'll need to change before using this plugin., _(*5)

Restrict access to a specific domain, _(*6)

If you only want a specific web tool to access this tool, you should input the domain here. (This sets up a Access-Control-Allow-Origin value, as well as does some checks on the referrer in the code) Leave this field blank if you want to be able to use this tool from anywhere., _(*7)

Secret key, _(*8)

This is a required field and is used to verify that the request is coming from you. Only requests that have this key in them will be allowed to access the checks., _(*9)

Using Update Notifier

This plugin is a simple wrapper for the core Craft code to check for updates. It returns the updates as a JSON response for you to use in your apps however you want. Simply make a POST request to the URL given in the plugin's settings page, with the parameters shown., _(*10)

Key: updatenotifierkey
Value: 33a6306c-a1e7-2656-4daa-76689d017c36 (for example), _(*11)
Key: action, _(*12)
Value: UpdateNotifier/getUpdates

Example Code

I've just stuck some jQuery code on here because everybody knows how to use jQuery right., _(*13)

Obviously if you use Axios or Guzzle or cURL, you can adjust to suit. This isn't particularly useful code…, _(*14)

$.post('https://example.com', {
    updatenotifierkey: '33a6306c-a1e7-2656-4daa-76689d017c36',
    action: 'UpdateNotifier/getUpdates'
}, function (response) {
    console.log(response.app);
    console.log(response.plugins);
});

Here's a screenshot of the sort of structure that you may get back:, _(*15)

Screenshot , _(*16)