While this month's release is a bit smaller than usual (we've been busy beavering away on some super exciting stuff) it still has some awesome features. The biggest change is that we've made it far easier to deploy to SSH deployment targets, like Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux or macOS, by removing the requirement for the Mono framework. This makes it a lot easier to deploy to these platforms. We've also upgraded ScriptCS for better scripting with C#, added a new authentication provider for the Okta identity management service and include numerous other minor enhancements and fixes. Read on for the full details.
In this post
Release Tour
SSH Targets sans Mono
Octopus Deploy supports deploying to Linux and macOS via SSH Targets. Because Calamari (the Octopus deployment executable) is built with .NET, Mono was a pre-requisite on SSH Target servers.
As of Octopus 3.16, Mono is no longer required!
SSH Targets now provide an option to use a self-contained Calamari.
The self-contained Calamari is built with .NET Core 2.0. Because .NET Core 2.0 is currently a preview release, we felt obliged to mark this feature as beta. But be assured, this is fully supported. We believe that .NET Core will provide the foundation of Octopus Deploy's cross-platform support in the future, and we will likely deprecate the Mono-based option at some point.
ScriptCS upgraded to 0.17.1
Octopus supports custom scripts written in C# and this is powered by ScriptCS. In this release, we've upgraded the library so you get the most modern ScriptCS support available. There are some breaking changes in this ScriptCS release - read more below.
Our custom scripts documentation covers everything you need to get up and running with writing C# scripts or any of our other supported languages.
Okta authentication provider
Octopus now includes an Okta authentication provider so you can easily authenticate with this service. Big thanks to Brent Montague for being awesome and submitting a PR for this.
Our authentication providers documentation provides more information on how to get up and running with this new provider or any of the existing ones.
Let's Encrypt required update
Let's Encrypt recently deployed an update, returning more data from a specific API call. Unfortunately the library we use to communicate with Let's Encrypt was unable to handle this, meaning both new registrations and renewals were unable to complete successfully. If you have setup the Let's Encrypt integration, please upgrade to ensure that your Portal certificate renews correctly.
Breaking changes
We need to point out that the latest ScriptCS has introduced some breaking changes so it's important to review their release notes before upgrading. This only affects projects with script steps written using C#, which are powered by ScriptCS under the hood.
Upgrading
This release contains a post-install data fix that may take some time (depending on the size of your Events table), so please ensure you allow time for this to complete. If you are running the watchdog service, please ensure this is stopped during the upgrade.
All of the usual steps for upgrading Octopus Deploy apply. Please see the release notes for further information.
Wrap up
That’s it for this month. We hope you enjoy the new features and our latest release. Feel free to leave us a comment and let us know what you think! Happy deployments!
