July 2015 Summaries

In May, Semaphore officially launched continuous integration and deployment support for Elixir projects, aiming to foster a deeper connection with the Elixir community by engaging developers using the language. Collaborating with Josh Adams from Elixir Sips, Semaphore released two instructional screencasts that demonstrate how to use their platform for continuous integration and deployment of Phoenix applications in Elixir, providing a valuable resource for those new to these practices. The videos guide users through automatically testing and deploying Phoenix applications using Semaphore CI, with the platform available for free on open-source projects and as a freemium service for private projects. Semaphore encourages engagement through Discord for discussions related to the article.

Version 1507.1 of the platform introduces several updates, including Bundler 1.10.6, which resolves the DependencyList issue from the previous version, and the availability of JRuby 9.0.0.0, which now supports Ruby 2.2 and includes POSIX-friendly IO and Process features. PhantomJS 2.0.0 is now available, alongside a tool for switching between PhantomJS versions, allowing users to specify their preferred version in build commands. The update also incorporates various Python versions, such as 2.6, 2.7, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, pypy, and pypy3, all managed via virtualenv, with pre-installed packages like pip and pytest. This release marks the beginning of full Python support on Semaphore, inviting Python project users to participate in early access continuous integration and provide feedback, with further details available in the platform changelog and discussions encouraged on their Discord channel.

Scheduled for July 21st, 2015, the upcoming platform update introduces a series of software version upgrades across various tools and languages, including Bundler 1.10.5, Cassandra 2.1.8, Elixir 1.0.5 with Erlang 18.0 support, Git 2.4.5, Go 1.4.2, io.js 1.8.4, JRuby 1.7.21, Maven 3.3.3, Node.js versions 0.12.7 and 0.10.40, PHP versions 5.4.43, 5.5.27, and 5.6.11, RethinkDB 2.0.4, and Scala 2.11.7. Users are encouraged to try the new platform immediately using Ubuntu 14.04 LTS v1507 (release candidate) to provide feedback before the final release. Detailed changes and potential incompatibilities are outlined in the respective changelogs, and users can participate in discussions on Discord.