Waypoint 0.7, one of HashiCorp’s newer tools designed to facilitate the building and deployment of applications, is now available and features a slew of UI improvements along with some additions to make it easier to use in concert with other tools.
Waypoint was first introduced in October 2020, in an effort to “provide a consistent workflow for build, deploy, and release across platforms” similar to what the company tries to achieve for environments with Vagrant. While version 0.6 was all about integration with Kubernetes package manager Helm, the latest iteration focuses on tool interaction in a broader sense.
Amongst other things, the Waypoint team welcomed triggers into the project by introducing a RunTrigger gRPC endpoint for the server component. The associated new function can be used to queue a job based on a stored trigger URL configuration, which is helpful for all sorts of automation tasks. To open Waypoint even further, the project’s configuration file has been fitted with the capability to fetch data from external sources such as Kubernetes ConfigMaps or HashiCorp’s secret management project Vault.
After having stepped back from his CTO role to be able to focus on engineering again, HashiCorp founder Mitchell Hashimoto really made good on his promise to move projects forward as an individual contributor by taking the time to add workspace and label scoping to the Waypoint configuration file. This allows users to specify alternative configurations for different environments (such as development and production) or label-dependent setups (so that specific regions can have their own tooling, for example).
A good UI can do a lot for the adoption of a project, which might be why most of the bigger enhancements seem to relate to the interface in the 0.7 release. Besides some reformatting, Waypoint now comes fitted with an exec terminal, a tab providing an overview of resources provisioned by operations, and a workspace switcher on app pages. Users also get a better insight into the connection of different stages due to a timeline component that has been added to all artifact detail pages, and the option to authenticate through the UI using an OIDC provider.
Waypoint’s command-line interface has been slightly reworked since the last release as well, reporting where operations are running, warning before conducting remote operations, and offering aliases for -app and -workspace flags. A workspace create command is meant to simplify the creation of workspaces via the UpsertWorkspace endpoint, while additional fixes make sure users can prevent projects from polling when working with the CLI.
Teams that have been using earlier versions of Waypoint should be aware that configdynamic has been renamed to dynamic, so using the old name may result in a warning, and img-based Dockerless builds are no longer supported with the new release. More details on the changes are available in the 0.7 release notes.