What's new in Timoni v0.30

[stefanprodan]

After a long pause, I'm back to shipping features in Timoni! This announcement rounds up the work landed in the v0.28, v0.29 and v0.30 releases: new module capabilities, a much faster development loop, and fixes for long-standing bugs.

Big shoutout to @reneleonhardt for relentlessly contributing fixes and improvements over the last few weeks 💟.

New Features

• Embedding files in modules - Timoni modules now support embedding plain files (configs, scripts, dashboards, web assets) into the generated Kubernetes objects using the CUE @embed() attribute. The redis and minimal example modules have been updated to showcase how config files can be templated and embedded in immutable ConfigMaps.
• Custom health checks - Module authors can now define CUE-based health checks for Kubernetes custom resources that are not kstatus-compliant. Health checks are declared under the timoni: healthChecks: field, and the #HealthCheckForCondition shorthand covers custom resources that signal readiness through status conditions.
• Offline OCI artifact builds - The timoni mod build and timoni artifact build commands write reproducible OCI archives or OCI layout directories without a registry operation, allowing deterministic and sandboxed builders such as Nix to package Timoni artifacts without network access.
• CRD vendoring - The timoni mod vendor crd command is now fully compatible with all CNCF projects, with the CRD-to-CUE importer being end-to-end tested against the Ecosystem schemas catalog.
• Symbolic links support - Local modules now support symbolic links, allowing monorepos to share files between modules, e.g. by symlinking the vendored CUE schemas under cue.mod/pkg. When publishing to a registry, the new --resolve-symlinks flag of timoni mod push and timoni artifact push copies the symlink targets into the artifact to make it self-contained.
• Concurrent bundle builds - The timoni bundle build command now builds instances concurrently. The new --concurrency flag defaults to the number of CPU cores capped at 8.
• Formatting CUE files - The new timoni fmt command recursively formats the CUE files of modules, bundles and runtimes. In CI, timoni fmt --diff prints a unified diff and exits with a non-zero code when files need formatting.

Performance Improvements

Local modules are now built in place, directly from their source directory, instead of being copied to a temp dir. This makes the development loop much faster: build time no longer depends on module size, instance values are injected as in-memory overlays leaving the source directory untouched, and CUE errors point to the real files being edited.

The bundle instance pipeline has been restructured:

• bundle and runtime workspaces are now assembled in memory
• every unique module version is fetched once per run and shared read-only between instances
• builds run concurrently with manifests assembled in the order defined by the bundle

Building a bundle of 50 redis instances (Apple M5 Max):

Scenario	Old time	New time	Old memory	New memory	Memory saved	Speedup
bundle build, default concurrency	2.19 s	334 ms	613 MB	206 MB	66%	6.5x faster
bundle build, --concurrency 4	2.19 s	460 ms	613 MB	124 MB	80%	4.8x faster

The timoni bundle apply command gains the memory reduction, while remaining sequential by design.

Fixes and Improvements

• The metadata of the generated objects is now validated using the Kubernetes API rules: DNS naming for metadata.name and metadata.namespace, and the kube-apiserver constraints for label and annotation keys and values. Objects in apply sets missing apiVersion, kind or metadata.name now fail the build with an error naming the CUE path of the offending object, instead of being silently dropped from the rendered output.
• Runtime values are validated before being injected into bundles. All runtime values never touch the disk, they are stored in-memory only.
• The module signing and verification with Cosign has been hardened over the last releases, strengthening the integrity guarantees of Timoni's supply chain security features.
• The release assets are now built with GoReleaser v2 and come with GitHub artifact attestations for build provenance.
• Timoni's CUE engine has been updated to v0.17.1, and timoni version now reports the CUE version of the linked library.
• The Timoni CLI is now available in homebrew-core, so brew install timoni works without adding a tap. It can also be installed with mise.

Sponsors

To support the development of Timoni going forward please consider becoming a sponsor on GitHub.

[ChieloChi]

Hi Stefan and the Timoni team,

I just upgraded to Timoni v0.30.0 and wanted to share some feedback after refactoring a Countly chart module to test-drive two of the new features:

• @embed() + text/template: This is a huge improvement. I extracted complex inline backup shell scripts (mongodb-backup.sh and upload-backup.sh) out of CUE multi-line strings into separate .sh files, and rendered them dynamically in CUE. It makes linting with shellcheck and IDE formatting so much cleaner.

• Offline OCI Builds (timoni mod build): Built a self-contained .tar archive offline, that's great for sandboxed CI pipelines and air gapped environments.

I have a question/feedback, I noticed that timoni mod push only accepts a local module directory but does not natively push a pre-built .tar archive file. I ended up pushing directly from the module directory instead . Are there plans to allow pushing built archives directly?