Version informations for Update automation

[Nidhoegger666]

Hi Factorio Team .

I am having some suggestions. I administrate a Linux Server for Factorio and would like to fully automate the updating process. Therefore I would need two things:

1. A reliable source in the current installation which version it is (Currently I do cat changelog.txt | grep "Version:" | head -n1 | cut -d' ' -f2). So maybe just a file "version" in the archive that contains the version? That would be great!
2. A parsable way what the current version is of stable and experimental. Maybe something like json? I would be happy with a plain textfile containing this informations. That way I could write a simple bash script that will periodically check the versions, stops the server, updates and restarts it. I would share that script of course!

Thank you!

[Bilka]

There's existing ways to get both of these things, although I agree that there should be better ways.

1. The base mod (data/base) has an info.json that contains the version.
2. factorio.com lists the versions on the main page, you could parse the html for them. You can also parse the download page directly, for info on that, see https://wiki.factorio.com/Download_API

[BrainFooLong]

I personally prefer https://gameservermanagers.com/lgsm/fctrserver/

It's pretty simple to update via these.