New Year, New StackStorm – v2.6 Released

January 25, 2018

It’s a New Year, and time for a new version of StackStorm. 2.6 is available for download now. The biggest change is moving the Web UI to the React JS framework, but of course there’s also multiple user- and developer-friendly fixes and enhancements in the backend. Read on to hear more about what’s changed:

Web UI Overhaul

Our Web UI was originally written using Angular. That served us well, but we had a number of issues, and we wanted to move to newer, more flexible framework. Thanks to a lot of work from a few clever developers, we’ve switched this to React. At first glance, you might think it looks pretty similar to before:

But as you start poking around you’ll notice a few changes. We’ve closed a number of long-standing issues. Small things that make a difference – e.g. remembering the state of the “Wrap newlines” button, more filters for the History tab, and key-bindings to make life easier.

This also sets us up for further enhancements, such as better support for colorblind users. We’re also planning a bigger overhaul of the UX, and now we’re in a position to do that.

Workflow Composer users will also see that we’ve started switching colors and logos:

This is not yet complete. You’ll still see a few Brocade references around the place. We’re planning to complete this migration in the next release.

On to the other changes!

Developer-Focused Improvements

Here’s some of the improvements and fixes that developers will appreciate:

• Packs can now have a lib directory to share code between actions and sensors. See the docs to understand how to use this.
• The default log level of all Python runner actions can now be set in st2.conf.
• The st2client package can now also work with Python 3. NOTE: This is just the start of longer-term Python 3 work. Python 2.7 is still the only officially supported and tested version. There may be rough edges if you’re using Python 3. Please file issues if you see anything misbehaving.
• Python runner action performance regressions have been fully fixed (this was partially fixed in 2.5.1).

User-Focused Improvements

And here’s more user-facing changes:

• st2 {run|action execute|execution re-run} commands now support the --tail flag. This will automatically follow the requested action output.
• core.local and core.remote now support password-protected sudo using the sudo_password runner parameter.
• You can now request the complete result set from commands like st2 execution list using the --last -1 flag.
• Some pesky \n characters were showing up in some execution outputs. This has been been cleaned up.

Other Changes

Other changes of note:

• If you have custom Python actions that use from st2actions.runners.pythonrunner import Action, this should be updated to use from st2common.runners.base_action import Action. The legacy style is deprecated, and will be removed in 2.7.0. All packs on the Exchange have been updated to use the newer style. Make sure you update our packs, including the core st2 pack. Run st2 pack install st2 to pull down the latest version.
• Inquiry responses marked as “secret” are now properly masked.
• Real-time action output streaming is enabled by default.

As always, full details in the changelog.

Thank you to everyone that contributed in some way towards this release.

Packages are now available in apt and yum repos. Make sure you backup first, and follow the General Upgrade Procedure to upgrade. We also recommend checking your packs for updates.

As always, if you run into any problems, get in touch via Slack or GitHub.