One of the nicer aspects of Firefox plugins is their ability to check for updates and prompt the user when it finds one. By default, it looks to https://addons.mozilla.org which is fine, if not desireable for a lot of projects. But what if you are a commercial entity who wants to control when things get made available in a much tighter manner?

Thankfully, Mozilla thought of this exact scenario and has provided a option in the install.rdf to handle it.

<updateurl>https://adam.goucher.ca/preflight/update.rdf</updateurl>

The update system is pretty slick and well documented, so I’m not going to redocument it. But these are the links you need if you are hosting your own update notification.

Also, note that I used https. Looking at the documentation around how FF handles the checking, things get a lot easier if you do it over a secure channel. If you don’t you have to provide a bunch of integrity checks, which is a pain.

And that’s all that is needed to avoid the queues that sometimes form on the official addons site.