It also monitors the triggered builds and communicates progress back to the CLI.Which has a rest API the CLI communicates with to request new editor builds to be triggered in Katana.It also uses the public download links as a 4th source in the situation where someone requests a published build.We have three of those right now, in locations where it’s easier for our build systems to download them quickly.Caches for previously requested editors.which can request, download and extract editor installers and combine them into a valid editor installation.The command-line interface (CLI) itself.So basically the downloader is a combination of these things:

How do we reduce unnecessary waiting when people request popular things?.

It’s obviously not just as simple as that, there is some heavy lifting going on in the background that you can’t see, like: So a couple of us sat down at the start of September 2018, using our 20% time that we get in R&D for freeform experimentation, which is also known as Fridays Are For Fun, and set about to try and create a generic way of getting editors for CI that would work for as many people as possible.Īnd thus, a couple of weeks later, the Unity Downloader was born.

Others created custom tools which would trigger Katana builds and download them to the CI machines.Īll the solutions were quite hacky and not particularly generic. Some of them ended up running CI on physical machines that would just have the editor permanently installed on them with hard-coded paths to each version needed. So last year we ended up with a lot of the package repos having their own custom way of grabbing the editor. We have had no seamless and unified way for the package CI to request a specific Editor build. Packages have their own repositories with a new CI system running on them.įor a package’s CI to be successful, the most important thing is its main dependency: the Unity Editor. We, of course, wanted to be able to verify and publish these packages and make sure that each of them would play nicely with the different editor versions, and satisfy our internal quality requirements. It was also a much-needed step on our roadmap to DOTS.īut like any transition, this new technical paradigm came with a set of challenges. This has allowed us to speed up the delivery process and help take some Unity features and extensions to the next level. More and more of Unity features are being moved from the main Unity repository and stored into separate packages repositories. Then, we decided to evolve and start using packages.

Unity download editor