Welcome to kyla’s documentation!

Contents:

Introduction

kyla is a library for “auto update” applications. It can be used as an installer, but the focus is quick installation and updates of large applications. The main features are:

  • Speed: kyla uses fast compression algorithms, reads and writes files sequentially, and only fetches the data it absolutely needs.
  • Scalability: Tens of thousands of files can be deployed easily. kyla also has first-class support for large binary files, splitting them up as necessary to provide streaming installations.
  • Web-first: kyla can install directly from the internet. It fetches only the minimum amount of data required, and overlaps downloading and installing. This way there’s only one progress bar, and no time and space is wasted on temporary files or waiting for large files to finish downloading.
  • Feature-based installation: Deploy only subsets of your application, and support configure functionality.
  • Upgrades, downgrades, configure: kyla can upgrade/downgrade your installation to another version. Only the data which changed will be transferred in this case. Upgrades, downgrades and configurations are handled through the same function.
  • Library design: kyla is designed to be embedded into your frontend. It provides an easy-to-use C API and can be statically or dynamically linked.
  • Reliability: It uses the SQLite storage engine for all metadata storage - one of the most robust databases in the world. Installations can be validated and repaired if they ever get corrupted.

Note

kyla is not a full-fledged installer taking care of registry keys, registering services, or similar. It is designed to deploy and manage applications in a single folder. If you need additional pre/post install hooks, you can easily build them on top of kyla. For a comparison with existing tools, check out the Comparison with other tools.

System requirements

kyla has been tested on the following OS:

  • Windows 10 x64
  • Ubuntu 18.04

Other Windows/Linux variants should work, as kyla only relies on few cross-platform libraries, but they’re not tested regularly.