Chauffeur v0.12.0

Thursday, Oct 26, 2017 5 minute read Tags: umbraco chauffeur
Hey, thanks for the interest in this post, but just letting you know that it is over 3 years old, so the content in here may not be accurate.

Chauffeur, my little Umbraco deployment tool is chugging along quite nicely. I don’t do a huge amount of work on it, mostly it comes in batches when I get requests from people who are using it. For the release I’ve just cut, v0.12.0, I’ve got quite a lot of changes in it so I wanted to do a bit more of a write up about them.

Side note: I cut v0.12.1 almost straight away because I realised the NuGet logo was broken 😛.

The Chauffeur Scaffolder

I believe this is the killer new feature of Chauffeur!

One of the hardest parts of using deployment tools is how to incorporate them into your existing project, and Chauffeur is no exception. Whether your project is something you’ve worked on for hours or worked on for months, the “Getting Started” is always a pain.

While on the train home last night I pondered this. I started by thinking “What does a Getting Started guide look like?” and I mapped out the steps:

  • Install the NuGet packages
  • Create your first delivery file
  • Add the setup steps
  • Export your Umbraco structure to a package, which means you have to create a package
  • Create a delivery step to import that

Well that requires a bunch of manual steps, and the “create package -> setup” step is one that’s really annoying to do (speaking from experience here!) so I started to think on how I could automate that. I’d been toying with the idea of a create-package Deliverable for a while now and this seemed like a logical intersection, I have some of the insights on that, why don’t I plug it in there.

So I quickly whipped up a GitHub issue and got cracking on the code. My ideal workflow is that you could do:

  • Install NuGet package
  • chauffeur scaffold
  • Profit

The new scaffolder will ask 3 questions, the name for the initial delivery, whether you want the install steps (install y and user change-password) and if you want a package generated of your site structure items (DocTypes, DataTypes, etc. excluding content).

Once done it’ll run and you’re ready to check everything and start collaborating!

Document Type Improvements

One of our clients here at Readify is using it on a new project and I was talking to the team on how they are using it and any pointy edges. Their biggest issue turned out to be something that I didn’t even realise was a bug and that is when you import a Content Type (aka Document Type) with a property change it doesn’t get reflected. I found it odd that no one had told me this previously so I did some investigation and found that there’s a problem that I logged on GitHub to track.

The crux, it turns out, is that the Umbraco import engine is designed to be a lot more non-destructive than I realised, and it doesn’t update properties, only adds new ones!

Well good news, in Chauffeur v0.12 this is fixed, I’ve created a bit of an extension over the importer to ensure that we handle that properly inside Chauffeur (and I created a regression test to cover it).

Delete operations

From here I started exploring more of the possible problems that could come up and one that I knew of but never had thought to deal with was removing of Content Types. Now there’s nothing in the Umbraco package engine (which I mostly rely on) that does this, after all, how do you import a delete? so I decided that the easiest way would be to extend the existing content-type deliverable with a remove feature command. Now you can do:

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umbraco> content-type remove <alias>

Another piece of feedback the team gave me was they’d like a way to remove a property, so I have added that too:

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umbraco> content-type remove-property <alias> <property alias>

Delivery comments

This is a small task that’s just been hanging out in my backlog, I wanted to have a way that you could add comments to a delivery file. A line comment is denoted by ## so you can do something like this:

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## Create the Umbraco database
install y
## Set the admin password to something super secret
user change-password admin passwordpassword

Again, it’s the small things that are nice.

Output formatting

Another thing that’s always annoyed me is how sloppy the output looked when you used content-type get-all (or get <alias>), and this was because, well, output formatting isn’t that easy when you’re using Console.Out. But I decided it was time to get it cleaned up and make a pretty table that has everything lined up. With this change we go from this:

        Id      Alias   Name    Parent Id
        1067    demo    Demo    -1
        Property Types
        Id      Name    Alias   Mandatory       Property Editor Alias
        73      someProperty    Some Property   False   Umbraco.TextboxMultiple

To this:

Id   | Alias | Name | Parent Id
1067 | demo  | Demo | -1
Property Types
Id | Name          | Alias        | Mandatory | Property Editor Alias
73 | Some Property | someProperty | No        | Umbraco.TextboxMultiple

That looks much better.

I’m starting to think about going “v1” with Chauffeur, it’s only been about 3 years since I cut the first lines of code for it, so it’s probably time. So that means I want to put a bit more polish on things and one of the things in doing that is I wanted a logo.

Well, I found one, I’ve grabbed an image from The Noun Project which is available from Ed Piel and used under Creative Commons from The Noun Project.

So everyone, install Chauffeur v0.12 and get deploying!