The release of ARA 1.0 draws closer with a third alpha milestone !
If there was a theme for this milestone it would be “back to basics”.
In the previous blog post,
I explained that ARA 1.0 was composed of several projects such as ara-server,
ara-plugins, ara-clients, ara-web and ara-infra.
As a user, developer and maintainer of these projects myself, I realized that the added complexity of keeping the projects separated did not provide enough value to be worth it.
Things had to be simple because simplicity is a feature in ARA and failing to be simple meant that we were not staying true to the project’s core values.
One repository instead of three
The ara-server, ara-plugins and ara-clients projects have been
merged into a single repository and you’ll be able to find them in the
feature/1.0 branch of the
main ARA repository.
This means less burden for contributors and maintainers, for example:
- We’re managing a single repository instead of three
- We no longer need to manage dependencies between the three projects
- We have one project to test, tag, release and contribute to
- Tests and CI no longer need to account for the projects being separated
By removing this overhead, the project becomes simpler to maintain which frees up time to do other things.
For users, this means that there’s only a single package with everything included on PyPi instead of three and 1.0 is already lightweight in terms of dependencies when compared to 0.x.
ara-web will remain a standalone project that provides a javascript web client to the API.
ara-infra will also remain since it’s for managing the infrastructure for the project – including this blog post and the Ansible playbooks to deploy it !
Two built-in Ansible roles
ARA 1.0 will ship with two built-in Ansible roles:
These roles work are already in use to deploy api.demo.recordsansible.org as well as web.demo.recordsansible.org from playbooks in ara-infra.
These roles are rough around the edges right now but they will evolve over time to provide a framework for integration testing different ways of deploying the new ARA API server as well as the web client interface.
Beta ?
There’s still some work to do before moving forward with what we’d call a beta.
For example, we need to iterate on ara-web and make sure the API is able to give it the information it needs.
Also, while the API and the API clients are nearing completion, we currently do
not yet have a CLI client which would allow users to query the API easily from
the command line (ex: ara playbook list).
There’s other things but I think those are definitely the ones that stand out the most right now.
In the meantime…
If you would like to contribute code, feedback, documentation or help test the alpha milestones with us, please reach out !