What it means
With most content systems, updating is when things break — so people postpone updates, and postponed updates are how sites get compromised. Loam is built so that an update is not an event.
How loam does it
- The engine is one folder, your site another. Content, templates, images and keys live in their own folders, and an update never touches them. No plugins to fall out of step, no database to migrate.
- Whole parts, never loose files. The engine is made of five members — core, docs, edit, setup and shell. An update swaps a member as a whole, because a member is tested as a whole. You can take all five, or only the ones you need.
- Signed releases.
loam updatetakes only a release signed by loam, checked against the trust anchor your site holds. A tarball that does not verify does not get unpacked. - It checks its own work. Right after the swap, the new engine renders the same handful of your pages the old one just rendered. If a page that worked stops working, the update undoes itself on the spot and names the page. A page that was already broken is reported, but never blocks.
- Someone chooses the moment. An update never runs by itself. Updating is one command, and a line in the site's journal.
What it costs
A licence. It buys the stream of signed releases and support — not the right to run what you have. A site without one keeps running, offline, without a check, for as long as you like; it just does not pull new versions. And an update is a moment someone has to choose: a site should never update itself into a state nobody has looked at.