April 20, 2016
by Patrick Hoolboom
We are pleased to announce the availability of StackStorm v1.4.0. As always this release is a mix of new features, improvements on existing features and bug fixes. Lets take a quick dive into what’s new –
Packages are the new way forward
Have you heard yet that we are now shipping packages i.e. debs and rpms for all our supported platform? We did debut these in beta form with v1.3.2 and are now ready to fully cut-over to installing StackStorm with standard packages. We are so excited by this that we will be publishing some more blogs about this topic very soon!
Head on over to install docs and check out the new install options.
ChatOps updates
One major update was an ability to provide chat adapter specific extra properties e.g. if you would like to have message show up with different colors in Slack we now have support.
Stay tuned for more updates in this space.
CronTimer improvements
Now our implementation of cron based rules has a cron expression like support. This means you can use all the common cron expressions such as a-b, a,b,c, a/b, etc. For more information and examples please refer to the documentation.
Creating Python virtual environments from st2ctl
Now passing –register-setup-virtualenvs flag to the register-content script and st2ctl will create Python virtual environments for the registered packs. This can be used when packs are deployed independent of the packs.install actions or the virtual environments require updates. This is usually the case in distributed HA deployments where StackStorm components such as action runner and sensor container run on many different servers.
Python actions can now easily access the datastore
All the Python runner actions now get passed in “action_service” argument to the constructor. This argument is similar to the “sensor_service” in sensors and allows actions, among other things to easily access the datastore.
Code framework for action alias tests
We have added code which makes it easier to write unit tests for action aliases. The best way to get started is to have a look at some examples on Github.
Support for timezones in the CLI
When interacting with CLI all the timestamps are displayed in UTC by default. This was done intentionally to make it easier to collaborate inside a team where members are distributed across different timezones. In addition to that, best practice also is to have all the servers configured to use UTC and this makes correlation easier.
Having said that, some people still prefer to have timestamps displayed in their local timezone. Users can now configure “timezone” in the CLI config (~/.st2/config) and all the tiemstamps in the CLI will be re-formatted and displayed in the configured timezone.
Out-of-box action improvements
Stock actions like core.sendmail, linux.wait_for_ssh, linux.traceroute and linux.rm get some much needed fixes.
Community contributions
The StackStorm community has been very busy and active over the last few months. There have been some new community contributed packs for –
Plus, a ton of additions and bug fixes across the board. To us the incredible part is that in the last 2 months there have been more community contributions to packs than contributions from StackStorm members. The StackStorm community rocks!
And much more!
For a complete list of updates and bug fixes see the changelog. Special shout–out to community members Jon Middleton, Kale Blankenship, David Pitman, Andrew Regan, Cody A. Ray, Jamie Evans and Paul Mulvihill for contributions and helping us make this release possible.
We hope you try StackStorm and look forward to feedback on what works and what does so that we can continually improve StackStorm. You can find us on the StackStorm slack community or tweet us at @Stack_Storm.
