Mint Forum

I have a VERY slow connection from home and I hate that every time I need to upgrade Mint, it takes a painful amount of time to upload files from my home connection. It got even worse now that I manage Mint installs for some clients. So after a bit of reading up on cURL’s man pages, I figured out how to download via the command line on the server directly.

The steps are as follows:

• Login via SSH to your server and ‘cd’ to the folder you want to download Mint/Peppers to.
• Execute the following curl statement. Be sure to replace EMAIL and PASSWORD with the appropriate values. Also, the .cookies folder should exist in your home folder.

curl --cookie-jar ~/.cookies/haveamint --data account[email]=EMAIL&account[password]=PASSWORD&account[action]=login" http://haveamint.com/

• The file ~/.cookies/haveamint should now contain your login details. Run the command cat ~/.cookies/haveamint and check for keys account_password_hash and account_email if you want to make sure the file is ready.
• Now you can tell curl to use these cookies when downloading files from haveamint.com. Simply use the following statement and replace URL with the URL of the file you want to download:

curl -L -O --cookie ~/.cookies/haveamint URL

Pradador, this is interesting, but I’m a bit worried about what Shaun will say. This kind of thing has been explored before, and: From here

I’m sorry but after much consideration I’ve decided that I will >>not be adding support for Sergeant Pepper to the >>Peppermill. Too small a percentage of Mint user’s would >>actually be able to take advantage of Sergeant Pepper and >>given that, the backdoor the implementation would offer to >>pirates is unacceptable.

and follow-up:

The vast majority of Mint’s customers are on shared hosts >>which disable the system() call or don’t allow PHP FTP access. >>As I said, very few would be able to use the Pepper, the >>potential risks don’t outweigh the gains.

Not to mention the amount of additional Forum posts and >emails I would receive from user’s wanting to use your third->party Pepper despite their server’s not being able to. While >not obligated to respond to each one (because they involve a >third-party Pepper) I couldn’t just ignore them. (posted by Shaun] (http://www.haveamint.com/forum/after_d … #post_8646))

as well as here

Till, you’re free to try. I spent about a month trying to work >around PHP security issues and oddities to provide an auto->update feature in Mint 2 but it just wasn’t possible due to the >variety of server configurations out there and the minimum >requirements for Mint.

and here

as well as here

I didn’t think you were attacking Mint. The upgrade process is >about as user friendly as it’s going to get unfortunately. >Fortunately, Mint is not targeted at “lay people” (but that >doesn’t mean some are not buying it anyway).

One click auto-update has been explored but it’s just not >possible given the state of PHP security on the vast majority >of servers.

If Shaun is OK with this, fantastic, but…