This Steam Deck guide covers Decky Direct Updater, a new Decky Loader plugin that I’ve been using nonstop since I installed it. If you run plugins that aren’t from the official Decky store, you’ll know how much of a pain it can be to keep them updated. This plugin does it all for you, straight from Gaming Mode.
What Decky Direct Updater actually does
Decky Direct Updater looks at the plugins you already have installed, finds their GitHub repositories, and checks them for the latest compatible stable releases. When something newer is out, it shows up as a pending update, and you can install it through the game launcher right into Decky Loader. That means you can now keep all of your plugins, official and unofficial, up to date with the click of a button.
It also checks in the background. Updates are looked for when the plugin loads and every four hours after that, and a green dot on the Direct Updater icon tells you a stable update is waiting. You can still hit Refresh whenever you like. Importantly, nothing gets installed without you saying so: you pick which updates to grab, and Decky asks you to confirm each install.
If a plugin’s source isn’t obvious, it gets a question mark so you can review it, either by accepting a suggested repository or searching for the right one yourself. There’s also a search icon next to Refresh, so you can look up a plugin by name, by owner and repo, or by pasting a GitHub link, then check its release details and install it. If you need to, you can even pick a prerelease or roll back to an older version, with an extra confirmation before any downgrade.
Steam Deck guide: how to install Decky Direct Updater
You’ll need Decky Loader set up first. Once that’s done, installing Direct Updater only takes a minute. I did it from desktop mode, but you can do it all from Gaming Mode too if you’ve got a browser to grab the link, or you can simply type the install address into Decky.
- Switch to desktop mode from the power menu, then head to deckyup.nukeador.com.
- Scroll down and copy the installation URL to your clipboard. At the moment it’s
https://deckyup.nukeador.com/install.zip. - Open Big Picture mode while you’re still in desktop mode. Otherwise you can’t reach the Decky menus from the desktop, and this way you don’t have to switch back to Gaming Mode.
- Open Decky’s settings, go to General, and make sure Developer Mode is turned on.
- In the Developer tab, paste the URL into the Install Plugin from URL box, select Install and confirm.
- Open Direct Updater from the Decky sidebar. It finds your installed plugins and starts checking for updates straight away.
If you’d rather use a file, the project also offers a ZIP download that you can install with Decky’s Install Plugin from ZIP File option. You only need to do this once, because Direct Updater checks for its own updates after that too.
Official plugins have updates waiting too
The thing that surprised me most was how many updates were available for the official plugins I already had. Quite a few of them had newer releases on GitHub that hadn’t made it through to the Decky store yet, so with Direct Updater you can be as up to date as the developers’ own repositories.
There’s a trade-off worth knowing about here. GitHub releases haven’t necessarily been through the Decky store’s review, so only install from developers you trust. Each plugin also needs a compatible ZIP release on GitHub for this to work. Plugins that don’t publish one, SteamGridDB being an example the project itself mentions, should still be updated through the store as normal. Direct Updater is meant to sit alongside the official store, not replace it.
Great news for plugin developers
This is fantastic for most Steam Deck owners, but it’s even better if you’re developing your own plugins. As soon as you’ve pushed a release to your repo, you can just refresh in Direct Updater and install it directly, without having to mess around with URLs every time. Developers who publish on GitHub can also point people towards it instead of building and maintaining their own updater.
It’s an independent community project by nukeador, it isn’t affiliated with Decky Loader, and it’s open source under the GNU AGPL v3 licence. It’s being worked on actively, too, with version 0.2.3 landing on 18 October.
More Decky Loader plugins to try
If you’re building up your plugin collection, Direct Updater pairs nicely with a few I’ve covered before. My Decky Nexus install guide is a good example of a plugin that lives outside the store, and my LSFG-VK 2.0 plugin guide walks through frame generation on the handheld. You can also catch up on recent Steam Deck plugin updates in my news roundup.
Final thoughts
Decky Direct Updater fixes one of the most annoying parts of running Decky Loader on Valve’s handheld. It’s quick to install, it never updates anything without your say-so, and it takes the manual GitHub checking out of keeping your plugins current. I’ll be putting together an updated list of the best Decky Loader plugins soon, and this one is a must-have.
