@thelonelycoder , any idea how to configure ABS to automatically search for updates, and then just update itself automatically? (i.e. check every night and perfrom the update automatically).
It would be nice to have such option configurable (on/off), in case some users would like to alywas have the latest version, but without going to everyday manually search and perfrom the update. Or is such option already integrated, but I haven't found it yet?..
There is a check built in for updates but no auto installer.
AB is somewhat complex, not just a single script when installing or updating. If something goes wrong during an update you may be left with incomplete files and a non-functioning ad-blocking or other services AB offers.
For this reason no auto-updater is available.
I am looking for such option, as I want to configure a router for my folks, and I am trying to make its maintenance as automatic as possbile. So far is working fine with the filters, but I am not sure how is working with the ABS itself, when the version is not going to be updated for some time: can it still get the filters and use them correctly? I do not want to have the router working for example for couple of months, then stop working, as I have no option to remotely maintain it myself.
The basic and most sought after functionality of AB-Solution - ad-blocking - never changed with all the version updates:
It downloads a bunch of hosts files, strips them down to the bare blockingIP-domain pair lines, combines them, removes duplicates and whitelisted domains and adds the file to dnsmasq to act upon.
I did change the way I do this from version to version to be more efficient or add or remove certain domains to whitelist by default but these are minor changes and have practically no effect on ad-blocking.
The updates AB receives are mostly in the region of additional functionality to manage white and blacklisting or new services you'd have to configure anyway.
Being unable to do that on routers you have no access to, these AB updates are more or less useless on such routers.
That said, once AB is installed on a router, it will run and perform the same no matter what version you have installed.
The blocking file auto-updates weekly in any case, independent of the version installed.
From that perspective, an auto-update of AB-Solution itself does not make sense.
The version I'm working on now is no exception, it does the same as the stable released version, just in a different way.