I had another question about UUPD, and they were asking if it could work outside of WordPress. The simple answer to this is no. The UUPD updater.php file is designed for updating WordPress themes and plugins and nothing more, but it’s not quite as simple as that.
UUPD server: the server portion of UUPD designed to handle product updates and licensing could be used for licensing outside WordPress and even updates if you wired it in correctly; it doesn’t care what it’s serving as long as it’s got a valid domain activation and license key.
They were looking at a Chrome extension, which is good, as this is the easiest way, as updates are handled by published ones via the Chrome Store, so this wasn’t necessary for them as this was their plan, but they did want to feature-gate some pro functionality, and they wanted to do it for free.
So i knew this would be possible, as I say, UUPD Server is effectively just an HTTPS gateway that accepts api calls so where they come from is irrelevant, so I set about building a simple test extension as a proof of concept, but even more so its totally customisable so you can test the proof of concept with your extention item and your own key on your own server.
Introducing UUPD Licence Test, a Chrome extension that does nothing but let you see this in action, so it starts off in free mode, no pro activation, and a licence key setting. The magic happens when we open the test settings; this is what allows you to modify the extension’s output for your own setup
Now we view the settings and edit them with our own details
The minimum that needs to be changed for testing is the product slug in my case, example-plugin and the license server; in my case, this is https://uupd.tdlab.uk
Once they are setup it looks like this
You can see I’ve already added my licence key too, but you can do this separately, and you can use different keys, i.e a valid and an invalid. Once you’ve done that, hit Activate and it will immediately tell you if you have been successful
Once this has completed, your extension should now be in PRO mode
On your licence server, you should also see the activation that has been made in MyCase; it is below
A deactivation removes the added Chrome extension and returns it to FREE rather than Pro.
This goes to show just how versatile UUPD-Server is, and while the answer to the original question was a no, the tools to do this are already there and free in the UUPD Suite of built-in items.
You can download UUPD Server and the extension tester here:
https://github.com/stingray82/UUPD-ChromeExtention-Example
https://github.com/stingray82/UUPD-Server
The following video shows you this in action if you’d prefer to see it step by step
