Ohai chefs!
It’s been nearly 3 months since the last knife-spork release, but I haven’t forgotten about you all. Oh no. I’m happy to announce that finally knife-spork has hit version 1.0.0, and you can get it from Rubygems or Github right now.
I don’t usually write blogposts for new knife-spork releases, but since a lot of the changes in this release are behind the scenes, I thought I’d give you all a bit more insight into what’s been done that just pointing you at the Changelog.
Since the first version of knife-spork was released in Jan 2012, there’s been what developers like to call a lot of “organic growth” in the codebase. In short, what this means is that I added a ton of new stuff without cleaning up the old. The result of this was that (and I’ll be the first to admit this) the codebase was rather cluttered, and contained a lot of duplicated code. This isn’t exactly ideal for me as the main programmer, but it’s doubly annoying for those of you who’ve contributed code to knife-spork, because finding your way around the source for the first time to figure out where your contribution belongs isn’t the easiest.
With that in mind, I’d like to say a big thank you to Seth Vargo from Customink (@sethvargo) who took on the task of refactoring the entire thing! Seth’s cleaned up the code, cleaned up command outputs and structured things a lot more logically and generally give the code a good tidyup.
Seth also contributed a significant new feature to knife-spork with his implementation of a plugin framework. Support for several external systems like irccat, Hipchat and Git was already present in knife-spork, but Seth’s separated this out into a proper plugin framework which will make it far easier to work on specific integration points and integrate new systems.
Alongside Seth’s sterling work, I’ve also added a few new features:
- The spork-config.yml schema has changed slightly to reflect the new plugin framework. Please check out README.md in the knife-spork repo root for more details
- “knife spork info” command to display the config Hash that spork is using, and show you the status of any Plugins you have installed
- spork check now gracefully handles missing local / remote cookbooks (bug reported by Jason Perry)
- spork check now has an optional “–fail” parameter to make it throw a non-zero exit code if any checks fail (suggestion by Jason Perry)
- A new safety check has been added which will prompt you for confirmation if you’re promoting a version constraint more that version_change_threshold versions ahead
- The abovementioned version_change_threshold is now a configurable parameter in your spork-config file which defaults to 2 if not set.
- Version diffs are calculated as follows: A patch level release increments by 1, a minor level release increments by 10, a major release increments by 100.
- The default threshold value corresponds to the patch level changing ie from 1.0.1 to 1.0.3
I’d also like to add a note of thanks to Bethany Benzur and Nick Marden who submitted patches for a couple of bugs pre-refactor. Although not present in the original form they were submitted in, both patches have been incorporated into the refactored code.
There’s a whole other pile of new features I wanted to get into this release, but I decided to get the new code out there for you all to use, and save the new shiny for version 1.0.1 Here’s a sneak preview of some of the stuff I’m working on for the next release:
- Configurable git behavior modes to support different git workflows
- The ability to “lock” and “unlock” cookbooks you’re working on
- Expose organizations information in notification messages
- Cookbook diffing to warn you about large changes
As always, thanks for using knife-spork and please keep the suggestions, Issue reports and Pull requests coming!