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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.

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