This is part of a miniseries explaining what I am working on lately: Porter which is based on the Cloud Native Application Bundle, or CNAB Specification. Start from the beginning
I just finished the release notes for Porter v0.5 and holy smokes, this is a MEGA RELEASE OF DOOM! 💥
The official release name is v0.5.0-ralpha.1+elderflowerspritz and as part of our release, I’ve finally gotten around to documenting how we name our releases.
Normally I’d just link to the release notes and let y’all enjoy the scavenger hunt of looking up the pull requests to figure out what features went in. But we went a lil overboard, a bunch of really cool features snuck in one after another before we realized “gee we haven’t released in a while” and I figured this one deserved a bit of showing off.
Install and Uninstall Bundles
You can now make a bundle, install it, then burn it to the ground all through porter. No need to fall back to using duffle anymore! 🎉
I am working hard to implement more commands so that you can do everything from porter.
Proper Templating
Jeremy has heard your request for templating and delivered! You can use Mustache template syntax in the manifest.
Anywhere you were previously using
something:
source: bundle.parameters.foo
you can now use
something: "{{ bundle.parameters.foo }}"
You may have noticed the extra quotes, that’s YAML for you. It’s extra motivation for us to add support for more markup languages. 😉
Mixin Install Command and Mixin Feeds
The core of Porter are mixins and pretty soon there are going to be A LOT. I have been working on adding mixin distribution functionality to Porter to make it easier to find and manage mixins.
The first step is installing them (upgrade, and uninstall coming soon).
$ porter mixin install kubernetes --feed-url https://cdn.deislabs.io/porter/atom.xml
installed kubernetes mixin
kubernetes mixin v0.5.0-ralpha.1+elderflowerspritz (851458b)
For the moment, all of our mixins are available from a single Atom feed but you could also install a mixin that someone from the community created and uploaded to their repository’s Github releases.
I’m also working on subscriptions so that you can subscribe to a feed and stay up to date with a set of mixins, such as the ones that come with Porter by default.
Kubernetes Mixin
We have a Kubernetes mixin now! Just point it at your wonderful YAML-filled manifests, and it will handle running them in your bundle.
The docs are a wee bit missing and you should tease Jeremy unmercifully about that. But until then, here’s an example of how to use it.
You can install the mixin with the following command:
porter mixin install kubernetes --feed-url https://cdn.deislabs.io/porter/atom.xml
Terraform Mixin
ZOMG! Our first mixin contributed from the community! A huge thank you to Josh Dolitsky for making this happen, and to Vaughn for adding the finishing touches to get it release ready.
We have two real world examples demonstrating how to use the mixin with AKS and KeyVault.
You can install the mixin with the following command:
porter mixin install terraform --feed-url https://cdn.deislabs.io/porter/atom.xml
Reorganized Commands and Help Text
The porter commands have been grouped by resource, such as bundles or mixins, so that it’s easier to discover and explore the available commands in porter. As the number of commands increase in porter, this new help text template should make it easier to navigate porter’s commands.
$ porter --help
I am porter 👩🏽✈️, the friendly neighborhood CNAB authoring tool
Usage:
porter [command]
Examples:
porter create
porter build
porter install
porter uninstall
Resources:
bundles Bundle commands
mixins Mixin commands
Aliased Commands:
build Build a bundle
create Create a bundle
install Install a bundle
uninstall Uninstall a bundle
Meta Commands:
schema Print the JSON schema for the Porter manifest
version Print the application version
Mask Sensitive Values
Sensitive values are masked with *** in the logs. 😎
All credentials and outputs are treated as sensitive by default. Parameters
can be as well by adding sensitive: true.
Smart debugging
When you pass in --debug to porter, the flag is passed across contexts,
such as into the bundle runtime during an install, so that you can see debug
info EVERYWHERE.
Phew, so yeah like I said, MEGA RELEASE OF DOOM! 💥 It was well over 100 commits between v0.4 to v0.5 and I hope we all learned a very valuable lesson here. 😅