May 13, 2022
by Jacob Floyd (@cognifloyd) with assistance by Carlos (@nzlosh)
StackStorm v3.7.0 has been released thanks to the hard work from StackStorm volunteers and our community at large! We’re very proud to have such an engaged and active community who keep coming up with new ideas to improve the StackStorm experience. During this release cycle, we have included some significant improvements, of which, the following are particularly noteworthy: Support for RHEL8/RockyLinux 8 and the deprecation of CentOS 8, Metadata Overrides, Action-Alias Testing, Action Clone Operation, and Expanded Garbage Collection.
Amanda McGuinness (@amanda11) led the effort to move away from CentOS 8 because it has moved to a rolling-release model that is not ideal for building StackStorm RPM packages. This is due to there being no assurance of binary compatibility with RHEL8. So, while ST2 still continues to support RHEL8, we now use RockyLinux 8 to build and test against. As part of this move, StackStorm now uses Python 3.8 on EL8, which is an upgrade from Python 3.6.
Be sure to pay special attention to the upgrade notes since any existing Python virtual environments must be re-created for the switch from Python3.6 to Python3.8.
This feature has often been asked for and has finally been implemented. Amanda McGuinness (@amanda11) took on the task of implementing the ability for users to override pack default settings. This empowers the ST2 administrator to make the decision of enabling/disabling resources in a pack, such as a sensor or a rule, without the need to edit the pack contents. The administrators decision will take precedence over the default setting provided by the pack developer even after reloading or reinstalling the pack. You can get the full story from Amanda’s blog entry: Override default resource status.
Tomaz Muraus (@Kami) made end-to-end testing of action-aliases much easier by developing a new feature in the st2 CLI. By passing text to be evaluated on the command line, st2 will report if it matches an action-alias, run the associated action, and format the action-alias results. This greatly improves the time to write complex action-aliases as well as provide the means to test them without needing the full ChatOps stack.
Use st2 action-alias test <message string> to easily test action-alias matching and result formatting. See the Testing an alias end to end documentation for more details.
mahesh (@mahesh-orch) and pradnya-orchestral (@pradnya-orchestral) made it possible to clone actions via ST2’s API/WebUI and CLI by adding an actions clone operation.
The new API endpoint /api/v1/actions/{ref_or_id}/clone takes ref_or_id of source action. The request method body takes a destination pack and an action name. The request method body also takes the optional parameter overwrite. Pass overwrite = true to force overwriting the destination action if it already exists.
The CLI command st2 action clone <ref_or_id> <dest_pack> <dest_action> takes source ref_or_id, destination pack name and destination action name as mandatory arguments. In case the destination already exists, the command takes an optional argument -f or --force to overwrite the destination action.
srimandaleeka01 (@srimandaleeka01) and Amanda McGuinness (@amanda11) expanded the garbage collector to clean up more resources. The GC will now purge rule enforcement, workflow execution, workflow task execution, and trace models, which were previously excluded from the purge process and could end up consuming a large amount of space over time.
See the purge documentation for more details.
There are well over 30 other fixes and improvements that have gone into this release and we encourage you to browse the changelog for more details.
A massive thank you to Jacob Floyd (@cognifloyd) for driving the release process and getting v3.7 out into the community’s hands in a timely fashion!
A big shout out to all the contributors for their work, both big and small (in alphabetical order):
@amanda11, @ashwini-orchestral, @blackstrip, @blag, @cognifloyd, @DavidMeu, @dmork123, @erceth, @hreeder, @Jappzy, @jdmeyer3, @jstaph, @Kami, @khushboobhatia01, @kingsleyadam, @ktyogurt, @minsis, @momokuri-3, @nzlosh, @pradnya-orchestral, @Rand01ph, @satellite-no, @sravs-dev, @srimandaleeka01, @winem, @ytjohn.
And lastly, a special mention for all the tireless work Eugen Cusmaunsa gives to the StackStorm project overall; the administration, project management, coordination, code reviews, user support, and much more.