There are various ways of doing ota update in mongoose os. The architecture of ota is given as follows.


OTA architecture overview
OTA implementation in Mongoose OS has 3 layers:
Layer 1. The lowest layer, implemented by the ota-common library. The API functions that do the work are updater_context_create() to start an update, a sequence of updater_process() to apply the next chunk of firmware, and updater_finish() to finish the update.


Layer 2. The RPC service that provides a remote management API for the low-level OTA API. It is implemented by the rpc-service-ota library. The RPC API are of two kinds: push and pull.

  • OTA.Update is a pull mechanism. Works only via HTTP. You pass a URL to the new .zip file as a parameter of the RPC call, the .zip file gets downloaded and low-level API calls apply it.
  • OTA.{Begin,Write,End} is a push mechanism. It works over any transport, for example, BLE, or MQTT. They are calling corresponding low-level API.

Layer 3. Helper libraries and tools that invoke the 2nd RPC layer,

  • mos ota command calls the “push” RPC, and can work over any transport by specifying the –port … parameter. That is the most universal method.
  • ota-http-client library is able to fetch firmware from a URL. This library is in fact used by the OTA.Update RPC implementation. Also, this library is able to periodically poll a given URL for the new version of firmware, and auto-update.
  • ota-http-server library registers and /update URI handler directly on a device. You can push the new firmware over the HTTP POST. This method is for the development purposes: curl -v -i -F filedata=@fw.zip http://IPADDR/update
  • ota-shadow library observes desired.ota.url shadow changes. If it gets a new URL, it triggers the OTA.Update with that URL. This method works for the offline devices – you can change the shadow of the number of devices, and they will get updated as soon as they come online.

In this Blog we will focus on Layer 3 ota-http-server for making ota updates.

For ota-http-server:
Step 1: Clone a project or open your project.

Step 2: Open mos.yml file in
Include the following library in mos.yml file under libs section:

[wifi.sta.ssid, "XXX"]
[wifi.sta.pass, "XXX"]
["wifi.ap.enable", false]
["wifi.sta.enable", true]

Note: Add your WiFi’s SSID in and Your WiFi’s password in

Step 3: Build and Flash the your mos firmware

  • mos build
  • mos flash

Step 4: Note the IP address of NodeMCU
Step 5: Do some changes in the init.js file and build the project again
Step 6:
Then, you can build a new firmware and push it using this command:
curl -v -F file=@build/fw.zip http://IP_ADDR/update

Note: You need to be inside the app folder in to use the above code.

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