Provide Ubuntu PPA (auto updates)

[alexgleason]

In Ubuntu, PPAs are the way to install and update software. Once it's set up the user can do something like this.

This installs the PPA and updates the package list:

$ sudo apt-add-repository https://some.service/timeglass/glass
$ sudo apt-get update

Then this installs the package:

$ sudo apt-get install glass

Then when new changes are detected in the PPA, they will be installed on the user's system.

If you've never done this, it's actually quite challenging. It requires reading a lot of unclear documentation and uses https://launchpad.net/ as the service. This requires you to upload your source code directly to the Launchpad servers, then the binaries and package files are built on the server. The configuration must be very precise.

An easier way is to use https://packagecloud.io/ which is closed source, but accepts pre-binary files as part of the package. This is what Slack uses to distribute on Linux. They offer a free public account as long as you don't host too much data, which I think you'll be fine with.