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| title: "Seven Years Under A Palm Tree" | ||
| date: 2016-04-24 | ||
| --- | ||
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| The last time I wrote on this blog was June 2013 as I geared up to launch | ||
| Capistrano v3 which was a complete ground-up rewrite. The rewrite had been | ||
| "finished" and working for a while, but given that it was a ground-up rewrite | ||
| in the spirit of Capistrano, but shared nary a single line of code with it's | ||
| forebear the release dragged up a bunch of mixed emotions, was Tom and I being | ||
| frauds writing new software and releasing it under an existing "brand name", or | ||
| was it a - what right did we have to make that decision in any case? | ||
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| Today I'm reflecting at the end of a weekend where many things seem to be | ||
| aligning. My son is 18 months old today, my company [Harrow.io][1] (more below) | ||
| will release it's Capistrano integration on Monday, and one of the most | ||
| significant releases of Capistrano since the rewrite in 2013 will be released. | ||
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| Serendipitously this also marks seven years to the week since my first commit | ||
| in Capistrano core landed, [trivial as it was][2]. Before I ever had code in | ||
| Capistrano I'd spent countless hours working to help people in IRC, and on the | ||
| then infantile StackOverflow (it was less than a year out of beta!), I'd also | ||
| written the tremendously popular `capistrano-handbook` which I finally uploaded | ||
| to Github on the same day that my code landed in Capistrano. I don't recall | ||
| those two miletones being related, apparently it was just a coincidence! | ||
|
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||
| Capistrano 3.x, as brutally different thought it may have been was incredibly | ||
| well received, through the rewrite we lost thousands of lines of custom DSL | ||
| code, gained a lot in speed and pluggability and an immeasurable amount in | ||
| *maintainability*. Of course we also quietly dropped some seldom used features | ||
| and added them back as people identified a will to upgrade but noticed | ||
| something lacking. | ||
|
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||
| So, tomorrow (2016-04-25) I'm [releasing Capistrano 3.5][3] which includes | ||
| tonnes of new features, nearly all community contributed and some that will | ||
| really, really help us to deliver more, better improvements in the future and | ||
| help us clean up some of the lingering issues about inaccurately written | ||
| documentation that predates Capistrano 3.x which confuses people. Matt's [`cap | ||
| doctor`][4] command will report unused variables, out of date plugins, list the | ||
| resolved variables for a given stage, etc. We're excited about this, it was | ||
| great achievement of Matt's to get that into 3.5! | ||
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| Another huge part of Matt's work is the change to [the default Capistrano | ||
| output formatter][5]. This will likely be as controversial as the original | ||
| rewrite, it's inarguably better looking, more concise and easier to pick the | ||
| important information out of, but people can be resistant to change, so it's | ||
| super easy to set back to the previous `pretty` formatter! | ||
|
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||
| Another important part of the 3.5 release is the integration with | ||
| [Harrow.io][1]. Harrow is platform/service/company that I founded with some | ||
| friends to make my work on Capistrano more sustainable by making it into my day | ||
| job. We built something that you can understand as being a "Continuous | ||
| Integration" tool but with a really distinctly different design to anything | ||
| else you migth have come across. It's designed to feel like a web-enabled | ||
| extension of Capistrano's principles. With stages, and sets of environment | ||
| variables, designed to make the tooling it wraps better, faster, and easier to | ||
| use. Like most things I've thought about doing with Capistrano over the years, | ||
| not least rewriting it from scratch, the decision to promote Harrow from within | ||
| Capistrano was not taken lightly, it's important to strike the right balance | ||
| between offering people a better experience with their software, without | ||
| forcing them into something they might come to resent. | ||
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| The current scope of the Capistrano+Harrow integration is a simple in-terminal | ||
| prompt (well behaved, presuming "no" if no answer is given within a few seconds | ||
| or no facility to prompt is available) when running `$ cap install` which | ||
| happens once and only once per project. We may expand the scope of this | ||
| integration in the medium-term future depending on the community feedback. | ||
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| Capistrano will always remain open source and [liberally licensed][6]. Harrow | ||
| is closed-source (for now) platform with a cloud subscription model, and an | ||
| on-premise "enterprise" version which are offered as paid commercial services. | ||
|
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||
| --- | ||
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| [1]: https://www.harrow.io/ | ||
| [2]: https://github.com/capistrano/capistrano/commit/0713ae6d4d2b5b0cb801d494123af5cf6199b717 | ||
| [3]: https://github.com/capistrano/capistrano/milestones/3.5.0 | ||
| [4]: https://github.com/capistrano/capistrano/pull/1642 | ||
| [5]: https://github.com/mattbrictson/airbrussh | ||
| [6]: https://github.com/capistrano/capistrano/blob/master/LICENSE.txt |