tag#versions

Watching Upstream Binaries with Concourse on December 2, 2018
When building software packages, it’s easy to accumulate dependencies on dozens of other, upstream software components. When building the first version of something, it’s easy to blindly download the source of the latest version off the packages’ website. However, once you’re past prototypes and need to deal with auditing or maintenance, it becomes important to have some [automated] processes in place. I have written several posts over the years around experiments for automatically upgrading components to avoid repetitive work.

Self-Upgrading Packages in BOSH Releases, Part 2 on October 21, 2016
Last year I wrote a post about how the process of updating BOSH release blobs could be better automated. The post relied on some scripts which could be executed to check and download new versions of blobs. The scripts were useful, but they still required manual execution and then testing to verify compatibility. My latest evolution of the idea further automates this with Concourse to check for new versions, download new blobs, build test releases, and then send pull requests for successful upgrades.

Self-Upgrading Packages in BOSH Releases on August 3, 2015
Outside of BOSH world, package management is often handled by tools like yum and apt. With those tools, you’re able to run trivial commands like yum info apache2 to check the available versions or yum update apache2 to upgrade to the latest version. It’s even possible to automatically apply updates via cron job. With BOSH, it’s not nearly so easy since you must monitor upstream releases, manually downloading the sources before moving on to testing and deploying.