CHANGES.md

2.6.0a2 (unreleased)

---

• Nothing changed yet.

2.6.0a1 (2024-12-09)

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• Adds a --local flag to ./batou deploy, which can be used in tandem with --consistency-only or --predict-only to check and predict using the local host's state, without connecting to the remote host.

2.5.2 (2024-11-20)

---

• Improve deployment performance when there are many components.

  Improves the performance of Component.__init__ which is called very often.

• Fix unused component detection

  There was a bug in unused component detection which was triggered occasionally. It is not entirely clear what triggered it, but it "helped" to have a lot of components.

2.5.1 (2024-11-08)

---

• Add release process with changelog support using scriv

• fix Component.require_one raising a configuration error with strict=False

• Adds command ./batou secrets decrypttostdout to decrypt a secrets file to stdout.

  • Useful for integration with git diff using textconv, see documentation for installation instructions.

• The error message shown when a batou deployment fails to start due to another deployment running at the same time, now correctly informs the user that another deployment is running instead of showing a traceback. (#446)

• When shipping a repository to the remote host using git-bundle, previously, when the history of the repository was rewritten, the bundle would fail to be created, due to the remote HEAD not being a predecessor of the local HEAD. This has been fixed by creating the bundle using the whole branch history, instead of just the changes between remote HEAD and branch HEAD when the remote HEAD is not a part of the branch.

• File Component: Converted sensitive_data flag to a tri-state variable. This allows manual overriding of automatic sensitivity detection logic for file diffs. The new possible states are:

  • None: Default automatic detection of sensitive data.
  • True: Always mark the file as sensitive and avoid printing the diff.
  • False: Always print the file diff, even if sensitive data is detected.

• Devhost provisioning: Add release attribute to provisioner config to allow using release metadata URLs instead of hydra_eval

2.5.0 (2024-09-04)

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• Fix unsatisfied resource message if a host-specific resource is not satisfied. (#463)
• Adds variable batou_generated_header to global template rendering context. This variable contains a comment block that signals that the file content is generated by batou. (#356)
• Development: update Sphinx to 5.3.0 to fix readthedocs build failures.
• Component object model: Class variable .instances renamed to ._instances to avoid collisions with user-applications.

2.5.0b3 (2024-08-05)

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• batou migrate now writes .batou.json with a newline at the end as pre-commit hooks expect (usually).
• Add support for python 3.12
• Unused Components, that is, Components that are initialized, but not used in the deployment, are now reported as warnings.
• The multiline strings fix in age-diffable encryption format was incomplete. This release additionally pulls up the configupdater version to 3.2, which includes the parameter prepend_newline used.

2.5.0b2 (2024-05-15)

---

• Fix multiline strings in age-diffable encryption format.
• Drop support for Python 3.6
• Add support for Python 3.10 and 3.11. Python 3.12 works too, but is not in the test suite, yet.

2.5.0b1 (2024-04-19)

---

• Improve Jinja2 templating error messages, showing line number and error message. (#417)
• Encryption: Add support for age-diffable encryption format. This format is a batou-specific extension for files that are configupdater-compatible and whose sensitive values are encrypted. This allows to show diffs of the encrypted files without revealing the sensitive values. (#440)
• Age encryption: Sort keys in the key lockfile to avoid unnecessary changes in the lockfile. (#445)

2.4.1 (2024-01-30)

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• Deploying an environment without any hosts now gives a more helpful error message. (#414)
• In october 2023 readthedocs.org disabled building projects using the web-configuration. This release adds a configuration file to enable building batou's documentation again. (#415, #422)
• `batou.utils.Address`` now handles getaddrinfo errors more gracefully. (#416)
• batou.lib.git.Clone now handles unquoting of filenames in git status output correctly. (#418)
• Errors thrown during attribute expansion are now explicitly handled and report the attribute name. (#419)
• Adds a batou secrets reencrypt [--environments ENVIRONMENTS] command to re-encrypt secrets files. This is useful if you want to re-fetch public keys from a keyserver. (#421)
• Improved behaviour of batou secrets add and batou secrets remove for age encrypted secrets (#421)
• If a component fails to load, the error message now includes a traceback. (#426)
• Exposes verify_opts and sync_opts in batou.lib.file.Directory to allow passing options to the underlying rsync call. The arguments are passed via a batou.lib.file.SyncDirectory component. (#427)
• Sending a git repository via git bundle now fails correctly if the bundle command fails. (#430)
• Clarify ensure_path_nonexistent behaviour and documentation on race conditions. (#429)

2.4 (2023-12-06)

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• No changes since 2.4rc2.

2.4rc2 (2023-11-29)

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• Fix bug where some rare exceptions (caused by DNS resolvers during provisioning) bubbled incorrectly and caused spurious deployment errors.
• devhost provisioning: properly quote variable values in shell provisioning
• bump some dependencies (PyYAML, ConfigUpdater)
• Add new rsync-ext repository type which uses an external rsync binary for repository synchronisation.
• Fixes bug where batou would crash if a secrets configuration file defines values for a host that is not in the environment.
• re-add some tests for secrets handling
• fix error message for ManagedContentBase
• add name tracking to class Attribute, show Attribute names in error messages

2.4rc1 (2023-09-12)

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• Add support for provisioning development environments using the new Flying Circus ephemeral VM devhost feature.

2.4a4 (2023-07-25)

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• Fix a small bug in age support

2.4a3 (2023-07-17)

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• Correctly implement output parsing for age from brew

2.4a2 (2023-07-07)

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• Expand age documentation
• Allow newlines to separate secret file members
• Make parsing for age output more robust

2.4a1 (2023-06-27)

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• Add age support

• Allow git Clone to checkout tags.

2.3 (2023-01-24)

• No further changes.

2.3b6 (2022-12-09)

Features

• Allow mysql authentication via sudo.

Bugfixes

• Secrets files created without proper prefix #333

2.3b5 (2022-09-21)

Features

• Do not clobber git clones by default. Add new option clobber to allow specifying that a git clone may clobber the target directory. (#298)

• Add checksum(value) method to Component to easily compute sha256 checksums. (#232)

Improvements

• Clean up migrations and make the output easier to read.

• Output usage strings for subcommands, instead of just the main command.

• Revise the new Address require_v4/require_v6 to allow environment-based customization that can be used to revert back to the old settings. (#270)

• Improve the error output by suppressing certain errors and grouping them properly to indicate which hosts see which errors in the model. (#272)

Bug fixes

• Check python venvs for a functional pip and rebuild if necessary.

• Fix use of File for syncing directories. (#270)

• Fix incorrect handling of of missing Attribute defaults. (#318)

2.3b4 (2022-08-22)

Features

• Add a migration framework. Automatic migrations can now be called using batou migrate. (#185)

• Allow to pin the pip version used in the Buildout component. (#263)

• Automatically migrate environments and secrets to the new structure using ./batou migrate. (#185)

• Support creating users in MySQL ≥8. (#242)

• Allow to check if an Address is configured for IPv4 resp. IPv6 using the attributes require_v4 resp. require_v6.

• The behaviour to specify Attribute defaults as either Python native objects or strings that will be expanded, mapped and converted has been changed again to simplify the mechanics and make migration errors easier to understand.

2.3b3 (2021-11-30)

Action needed

• Require defaults to be explicitly declared for Attribute. (#237)

Bug fixes

• Ignore hostmap entries for hosts that have changed their dynamic hostname settings to false.

Features

• Automatically pick up provision.sh and/or provision.nix.

  You do not need to explicitly define a COPY command to copy the provision.nix to the container, but if you do then we avoid doing it twice.

• Warn if neither provision.nix nor provision.sh are given as that seems more of an accident (like misspelling the filenames).

• Continue deployments on failure when running fc-manage during provisioning but be more explicit about errors and warn the user that something maybe be fishy in the deployment subsequently.

• Use different colors for success depending on whether you ran a real deployment, a consistency check, or a predition. (#209)

2.3b2 (2021-10-05)

Action needed

• Fail if an attribute is set both in environment and via secrets. (#28)

• Avoid implicit conversion of Attribute defaults. In cases where the default value should be converted, use default_conf_string. This may result in some changes if your code relied on this implicit conversion. If you use batou_ext, update to a current commit.. (#89)

• Raise an error if an internet protocol family is used but not configured. (#189)

Bug fixes

• Fix Python 3 compatibility with some Mercurial-based batou repositories.

• Adapt bootstrap.sh to the use of appenv.

Features

• Integrate remote-pdb to debug batou runs. (#199)

• NetLoc objects are now comparable. (#88)

• Enhance file Mode objects to accept integers, octal mode strings and 'rwx' strings as the mode argument. This allows homogenous use in Python code and overrides through config files. (#61)

• Do not render diffs for files which contain contents of secrets/*. (#91)

• Assure that requirements.lock is build with the oldest supported Python version to keep it consistent – newer Python versions have included some packages in standard library which older ones need as dependencies. (#145)

• Remove default option for installation via pip. (#212)

• Implement dynamic, pluggable provisioning of hosts.

  We provide a built-in plugin to support NixOS development containers that feel similar to the Flying Circus VM platform.

Other changes

• Improve error message for DNS lookup semantics.

• Render a better error message if gpg failed to decrypt a secrets file. (#123)

• Raise exception when calling batou secrets add or batou secrets remove with an unknown environment name. (#143)

• Render an error message if batou secrets summary fails during decryption. (#165)

• Do not write secrets files without recipient. (#184)

2.3b1 (2021-05-21)

• Drop support for Python 3.5. (#114)

• batou.lib.buildout: Enable support for Buildout 3 by allowing to specify a wheel package version to install in the virtualenv. (#148)

• Fix bootstrapping projects with the new appenv structure. Vendor an appenv version to ensure lockstep compatibility.

• Fix consistency check semantics: we accidentally performed actual deployments during consistency checks.

• Fix rsync repository mode to capture deleted top-level elements in the source.

• Improve DNS lookup semantics.

  We experienced two major problems with the current code:

  1. IPv6 lookups were done opportunistically and thus if DNS issues happened during deployments we would suddenly drop IPv6 support instead of failing.

  2. There was no logging to find out why the code was making specific decisions and to see what the underlying network APIs were returning. We now provide detailed debug logs for analyzing DNS issues.

  There were slight adjustments in the internal API (resolve/resolve_v6) that should be backwards compatible.

  The public API reflects a more strict stance now:

  • by default we only look up IPv4

  • you can explicitly set the require_v6 and require_v4 options for Address objects. batou will then perform the required lookups (or not) and it will be a hard failure if required lookups can not be performed.

  We recommend to adjust those parameters on Address objects depending on your environment, e.g. if you want IPv6 in production but not in Vagrant.

2.2.4 (2021-02-11)

• Repair File(group=), it now works just like File(owner=)

• Remove debugging code from secrets editing which caused encryption errors to crash and loose unsaved edits. (#139)

• Fix shipping of deployment code with git-bundle when using a branch. Before the entire branch history was uploaded with each deployment to each host (#131)

• Allow specifying a custom pip version in AppEnv.

2.2.3 (2021-01-20)

• Fix #124: notifications crashed when trying to display environment names but used environment objects.

2.2.2 (2020-12-14)

• Another brownbag release - connecting to remote hosts was broken after refactoring due to missing test coverage. Fixed and added coverage.

2.2.1 (2020-12-14)

• Fix error reporting that was partially broken in 2.2.

2.2 (2020-12-10)

• Add secret files in addition to secret overrides. Using ./batou secrets edit {environment} {example.yaml} you can now create multiple files that are all encrypted using the environment's keys.

  To access those secrets you can read them from environment.secret_files['{example.yaml}'] in your deployment.

  This feature is useful to embed longer data or formats that are hard to embed syntactically into the cfg/ini style of the main secrets file.

• Fix bug preventing to use nagios=True in Supervisor components, introduced in batou 2.1. (#98)

• Make batou compatible with Python 3.9, ie asyncio's all_tasks has been moved to a new location. (#93)

• Actually silence SilentConfiguration errors.

• Consider unknown secret overrides (components and attributes) to be a configuration error.

2.1 (2020-09-09)

• Bug 81: provide explicit support for JSON- and YAML-files with proper integration to the new diff support and the ability to update data through a "dict merge" approach.

• Bug 77: use ConfigUpdater so comments are kept when editing secrets.

• Bug 1: provide better error message if remote user does not exist.

  This is also cleaning up the general error output and we're now hiding full tracebacks unless batou is run with --debug. People keep complaining about traceback output and I agree that it makes things harder to read for someone not used to scanning through them quickly.

• Bug 63: provide better error message if GPG is missing.

• Bug 65: don't allow passing undefined namevars or undefined attributes to the component constructor. Also prohibit (accidentally) overriding methods.

• Bug: zsh compatibility on the remote host was broken with more complex sudo mechanism. Added a ZSH workaround.

2.0 (2020-07-15)

• Ignore directories when verifying archive extractions to avoid false non-convergence.

2.0b14 (2020-06-25)

• Make sudo properly conditional if we log in directly with the service user, but avoid adding a re-connect performance penalty.

2.0b13 (2020-06-25)

• Fix git clone when cloning into the component work directory. #27

• Fix binary file handling that broke during 2to3 migration and the test was doing the wrong thing.

• Allow marking file content as sensitive, which - for now - will suppress diff generation/logging.

• Allow specifying the service_user attribute per host.

• Bugfixes for file components so that verify() is more robust in predictive runs.

• Add argument 'predicting' to the verify() function signature. This argument can be accepted optionally (so we're backwards compatible) and will indicate that we're doing a predictive run so we can avoid failing when trying to rely on output from earlier components.

• Allow the Content component to predict a change based on a not-yet-realized source file on the target system.

• Limit parallel connection setup to 5 connections at once. Also, retry up to 3 times per connection and stagger retries according to a CSMA/CD schema. This helps make connection setup more reliable if using SSH jump hosts where many connections may cause sshd's MaxStart to start rejecting new connections. (#55)

• Allow adding data-* overrides to host sections in environments' secrets files.

• Reduce AppEnv component directory hashes to 8 byte to avoid the shebang (#!) 127 character path limit.

• Improve verify() of archive handler so we predict a change if something goes wrong (like not having the archive downloaded yet)

• Fix "is supervisor program running" check if it is stopped or exited

2.0b12 (2020-05-13)

• Fix broken sort of configuration errors. (#52)

2.0b11 (2020-05-13)

• Fix "is supervisord running" check in the Supervisor(enable=False) case

2.0b10 (2020-05-11)

• Fix Python 3 compatibility for Debian logrotate component.

• Improve output ordering and formatting. The diffs for predicted (or applied) changes now appear in proper order.

• Provide better error messages when batou fails to lock a secret file.

2.0b9 (2020-05-09)

• Refactor the appenv component into smaller components (and move it to batou.lib.appenv.

• Always update pip when installing an appenv - this also fixes the Travis tests.

2.0b8 (2020-05-08)

• Replace 'Deploying ' with 'Scheduling' as this is only the moment where we decide that a component is not blocked by another any longer and can done as soon as the worker pool is able to do it. Specifically this means that the following output isn't necessarily from this component.

• Mark the hostname for each deployed component in the breadcrumb output so that asynchronously deployed components can be visually identified correctly.

• Show diff of file changes - both during predict and deployment - to better estimate whether template changes are as expected.

2.0b7 (2020-05-07)

• Update embedded appenv to support Python 3.4+.

• Add component AppEnv to manage virtualenvs similar to the appenv package superseding previous virtualenv and buildout components.

• Allow using assert statements instead of batou.UpdateNeeded.

• Ensure the working directory is the defdir during the configure phase to allow using relative path names.

2.0b6 (2020-04-24)

• Various smaller fixes to get the remoting code working again.

• Update supervisor to 4.1 and Python 3.

• Allow specifying major versions for virtualenvs (i.e. '2' and '3') to get convergence for virtualenvs where we don't control the minor version of the targets.

• Add ability to disable supervisor programs.

• Remove '--fast' and '--reset' mode as this isn't needed/ supported by appenv at the moment.

• Simplify SSH/sudo and try sudo first. Probably needs further attention once we're along the release cycle.

• Fix Python 2.7 virtualenvs - upgrade to latest old-style release of virtualenv.

2.0b5 (2020-04-15)

• Switch to new bootstrapping/self-installing pattern "appenv". See appenv.py for a work-in-progress schema.

2.0b4 (2020-01-13)

• Fix incorrect long->int conversion from 2to3. (Mercurial support)

• Fix brownbag release due to missing support files.

2.0b3 (2020-01-10)

• Fix Python3 compatibility for logrotate and crontab

• Add six as dependency, so deployments can be made compatible to both Python 2 and 3 more easy.

2.0b2 (2019-10-15)

General

• Make encryption/decryption error prompt more readable.

• Fix coding style issues.

Features

• Add coarse grained parallelization of deployments.

  Using asyncio we now schedule rooot components for deployment as soon as all their dependencies are completed. However, due to execnet being synchronous this only has a visible effect for components on multiple hosts. This will speed up long running multi-host deployments.

  In the future this will become more fine-grained so that we can even deploy multiple independent components on the same host in parallel.

Bugs

• Fix issue #5: allow using % in secrets similar to regular overrides.

• Fix secrets editing, add test coverage for the affected code.

Testing

• Relax global pytest timeouts to avoid slow network failures.

• Switch from broken/abandoned pytest-codecheckers to pytest-flake8

• Enable flake8, remove unused pytest markers.

• Fix warnings

• Make warnings errors.

Build system / Development environment

• Update example batou scripts

• Fix travis build environments. Support Python 3.5, 3.6, 3.7, 3.8-dev and nightly (also 3.8 currently).

• Generalize development bootstrapping code for dual use in local and travis environments.

2.0b1 (2019-10-11)

• Drop support for Python 2.

• Move to Python 3.5+.

  A smooth migration mechanism may become available in the future based on users' needs.

• The default hash function is now 'sha512', existing deployments need to be migrated manually.