July 2014 Summaries

The recent updates to the build log output renderer and the release of the terminal gem version 0.3.2 introduce several enhancements aimed at improving user experience. Notably, npm output rendering now mirrors its appearance in the terminal, offering a more seamless and familiar interface. Additionally, the updates include basic support for background colors and the integration of Unicode emojis, allowing for more expressive build scripts. The enhancements also extend to the correct rendering of ANSI art, facilitating the display of important build information in a visually appealing manner.

A new version of the Buildbox Agent, version 0.2, has been released, featuring significant updates and improvements. The agent, rewritten in Golang, includes nearly 100 commits with enhancements such as the ability to download build artifacts via the command line, allowing for more flexible asset management across build steps and servers. Additionally, a new tool called buildbox-data has been introduced to manage build metadata, functioning as a per-build key/value store that facilitates data transfer between build steps. Improvements in process termination have been made by ensuring that unresponsive processes receive a SIGKILL after an initial SIGTERM, ensuring child processes are also terminated. Logging has been enhanced with the integration of logrus, which simplifies the codebase and provides debugging capabilities. Users can easily upgrade to the new version by following the provided guide, and acknowledgments were given to contributors from MoneyBird, Ninja Blocks, and Envato for their support in this release.

Terminal, a Ruby library used for rendering job logs, has been open-sourced, allowing users to transform arbitrary shell output into aesthetically pleasing HTML with ease. By using a straightforward API, users can integrate Terminal into their tasks, and it also includes a command-line utility for testing output directly from the terminal. Users can pipe outputs such as rspec results into Terminal, and with the --preview flag, they can view the rendered HTML in a browser. Terminal is particularly useful for debugging job logs in Buildkite, as it can help identify issues by rendering log content fetched from Buildkite's API, with the added encouragement for users to contribute by submitting issues or pull requests. More information about its usage and development can be found on its GitHub repository.

Buildbox has introduced several new UI updates aimed at enhancing user experience and functionality. These updates feature a redesigned projects list view and project header, both of which now include links to scheduled and running builds, as well as build durations. The navigation bar design has also been improved, and all pages now update in real-time when new builds are triggered. Additionally, emojis are now fully supported throughout the platform. The team is focused on continually improving the reliability of these real-time updates.