Skip to main content

Whiskers - a tool for keeping track of your buildouts

Few years ago I released a first version of Whiskers together with buildout.sendpickedversions. It's about the time to push new version out.

What is Whiskers?


Whiskers is a Pyramid web application which stores information about your buildouts so that you don't have to manually check what they contain. All the data to Whiskers is transferred by buildout.sendpickedversions - an buildout extension which keeps track of packages your buildout uses and sends the data in json-format to Whiskers-server.

Reason for Whiskers?


Main reason for me to develop Whiskers was based on the need of knowing what packages I have in our servers. I'm working at the University of Jyväskylä and part of my job is to maintain our Plone instances. We have about 100 Plone instances with slightly varying setup. If we needed a new version of some specific package it meant lots of work to have a list of Plone-sites which needed the update. With Whiskers I know what to update after few clicks.

New tricks


Since last Plone conference in Arnhem I've tried to give Whiskers (and buildout.sendpickedversions) some well deserved attention and simply make it better.  Outcome of this slow process was finally published earlier this month and it has several new features:
  • Whiskers keeps track of hosts where buildouts are ran.
  • Whiskers keeps much better track of package requirements - every requirement and version is tracked.
  • Whiskers knows packages which are not used by any buildouts anymore.
  • Whiskers knows your buildouts history and has settings view where you can configure how many buildouts is being stored to DB.
  • New Twitter Bootstrap based UI.
Most above features needed a lots of changes to buildout.sendpickedversions - not to mention that things have changed a bit after zc.buildout 2.1.x release. New Whiskers requires you to use new release of buildout.sendpickedversions.

If you are using old version of Whiskers, please note that new version is not compatible with old one.

Help me to make Whiskers better


If you are using Whiskers and have ideas how to improve it, please share those ideas with me by creating a new issue in Github or send in a pull request.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Speed comparsions between Plone and Wordpress

Jon Stahl wrote recently a blogpost about Plone being three times faster than Dropal, Joomla and Wordpress . We had a small discussion about this in my workplace and as my colleague pointed out this wasn't a really that comprehensive test that you could state Plone being 3 times faster than it's competitors. This seemed a bit unfair test considering how fast this has been spread in tweet/blogosphere, so I decided to repeat the test with a bit more critical viewpoint. What's wrong in the original test? No one would consider opinion poll with 10 answers nowhere near trustworthy - it's all the same with requests. I didn't want to put up all the cms so I just set up second best (Wordpress 2.9.1) and compared that to my Plone development site (4.0a3). As a comparsion I did the first test with same ab command Jon used and my iMac gave following results: Wordpress: 7.13 requests / second Plone: 17.10 requests / second So far we have clear winner and Jons data hol
7 comments
Read more

Usability and Plone

I've seen in here and there someone mentioning that usability of Plone is very good. Lot's of people - me included - like the fact that in Plone you don't have separate content management interface compared to some of Plones rivals. That counts for something when we're talking about good usability. Still that is only one quite small part of the whole picture. So what else is there? What do people like in Plone and where are the rough edges for end users? If general consensus is that Plone does have good usability, where is the actual proof of that? On plone.org I found one page in developer documentation mentioning following:  "Plone differentiates itself on usability. The intuitiveness of the user interface is what attracts people to Plone the most." I interpret this sentence meaning about the "one view for all" approach. What bugs me in this is that this whole sentence about good usability is about how the UI works compared to Plones competi
4 comments
Read more

Problems with Plone version pinning

Since we splitted our one huge Plone site to several smaller ones we've been looking for the correct procedure to keep things running smoothly and to make updates as painless as possible. So far we haven't found the right way and every update has had some problems. Some of the problems are related to the fact that we have about 24 sites to maintain and adding a new content type to all of them means lots of work. Below are all the steps needed for update (and solutions we've founded so far). 1. Add your new product to buildout.cfg eggs and zcml list. Do this 24 times and you'll find yourself thinking there has to be better way. Luckily there is; you can extend your buildout.cfg with some general config file (eg. deployement.cfg). Most tutorials describe a way where you have those two files living side by side in filesystem and you run buildout with -c deployement.cfg option, but this doesn't remove the actual problem. We have our deployement.cfg living in diffe
3 comments
Read more