Getting the software

Installers come from the download centre, not from a public releases page.

Two reasons. A school that has bought a product should not be sent to a source repository to find it. And a download from the centre is attributable: we know which school took which build, which matters when you ring up about a version, and access stops when a licence does.

Signing in without an account

There is no account and no password.

We already hold your administrator’s email address and we have verified it, so that is what you sign in with.

1. Go to the download centre and enter the administrator email address on your deployment. It has to be that address; any other gets the same polite “check your email” and nothing arrives.
2. Follow the link we send. It works once and expires after 30 minutes.
3. You are signed in for seven days, so an upgrade does not need a fresh email every morning.

Requests are rate limited, because an endpoint that emails an address the caller chose is otherwise a way to use us to deliver post nobody asked for.

Note

Asking for a link never reveals whether an address belongs to a customer. It always reports success. Whether a particular school buys from us is their business, not something our sign-in page should confirm to anyone who guesses an address.

During onboarding you do not need one

If you are still setting up, the invitation link from onboarding authorises installer downloads by itself. You do not have to go and get a download-centre link before you can install anything.

The download centre is for afterwards: upgrades, a second server, a rebuild.

What you will find

The current version, with every file that belongs to it, grouped by platform so you are picking a machine rather than reading filenames.

Platform	File
Windows	plugboard-win32-x64.zip
Linux, Intel or AMD	plugboard-linux-x64.tar.gz
Linux, ARM	plugboard-linux-arm64.tar.gz
macOS, Apple silicon	plugboard-darwin-arm64.tar.gz
macOS, Intel	plugboard-darwin-x64.tar.gz

Older versions are listed too, newest first, which is what you want when you are rolling back rather than forward.

The list is read from what is actually on disk rather than from a table of what was published, so a release that was announced but never copied across is not offered as a link that fails.

Checking what you downloaded

Every archive has a checksum published beside it. Verify before unpacking:

sha256sum -c plugboard-linux-x64.tar.gz.sha256

On Windows PowerShell:

Get-FileHash .\plugboard-win32-x64.zip -Algorithm SHA256

and compare it to the matching .sha256 file.

This matters more than the usual hand-waving about checksums, because the automatic updater runs unattended with privileges and refuses any archive whose checksum does not match. Doing the same by hand on your first download keeps the chain intact from the start.

If a download will not start

Symptom	Cause
The link says it has expired or been used	They are single use and last 30 minutes. Ask for another
No email arrives	The address is not the administrator address on your deployment. Check the one in your onboarding email
Signed in, but nothing is listed	No build has been copied across for your platform yet. Tell us
You were signed in and now you are not	Sessions last a week. Ask for a new link
Signed in, but downloads are refused	The customer record is not active. That is a billing conversation, not a technical one

That last row is worth understanding. A suspended account keeps its running deployment, because the licence decides that and nothing in the billing path revokes a service desk. What it does not get is new builds.

How your instance knows about a new version

Separately from you downloading anything, a deployment asks the control plane what it should be running on its channel. That is what puts an update notice in front of you.

Nothing downloads or installs itself on the Docker or source routes. The on-premises bundle is the exception and updates itself overnight by default, which you can turn off. See updating.

You also get an email when a release is announced, once per release, marked if it changes the database.

Managed hosting

You do not need any of this. We install and update your deployment. The download centre exists for self-hosted deployments and for anyone running a second environment of their own.