New features in Nelm v1.1.0-v1.11.0

[shurup]

It’s been almost five months since Nelm v1.0.0 was released. Nelm has received many new features, not to mention numerous bugfixes. This post summarises the most significant changes recently introduced in Nelm. They include 2 new experimental commands, 7 new flags, 2 new annotations, new functions, and several other improvements.

New features

• New annotations:
  • werf.io/sensitive-paths — mask sensitive parts of diffs in the nelm release plan install output
  • werf.io/log-regex-skip — hide Pod log lines that match regexp
• New flags:
  • --force-adoption — force adoption of the resources in the cluster, even if they have missing or invalid release annotations and labels
  • nelm release install|rollback|uninstall|plan --timeout — forcefully stop the operation when the specified timeout is passed
  • nelm release get --print-values
  • nelm release install|rollback|uninstall --no-pod-logs — disable Pod log collection and displaying
  • nelm release install|plan --no-install-crds — skip installing CRDs from the crds chart directory
  • nelm release install --release-labels
  • nelm release install --release-info-annotations — save custom meta information inside of a release; it can be later retrieved via nelm release get
• New Helm template functions for debugging: include_debug, tpl_debug, printf_debug, dump_debug — and detailed templating errors (see details).
• Enable log coloring by default in popular CI systems: Jenkins, GitLab, GitHub Actions, CircleCI, TeamCity, Travis CI.
• Status tracking for 12 more popular Custom Resources from such projects as Argo CD, Flux, Prometheus, cert-manager, and more (see details).
• Decreased Kubernetes API server load.

New experimental features

The following new features are considered experimental and are, thus, disabled by default until Nelm v2 is released. To use them now, you need to enable relevant feature gates.

• Allow specifying remote charts (in addition to the local ones) in the CLI commands, such as nelm release install. Activated by NELM_FEAT_REMOTE_CHARTS=true.
• Native nelm release list command. Activated by NELM_FEAT_NATIVE_RELEASE_LIST=true.
• Native nelm release uninstall command. Activated by NELM_FEAT_NATIVE_RELEASE_UNINSTALL=true.
• Hide only the actual secret fields when displaying diffs for Secrets or resources with the werf.io/sensitive: "true" annotation. Activated by WERF_FEAT_FIELD_SENSITIVE=true.

There is also a special NELM_FEAT_PREVIEW_V2 feature gate allowing you to activate all new features that will be enabled by default in Nelm v2.

If you’re interested in staying updated about other new features in Nelm, feel free to check out the Releases page or watch this repo on GitHub. Missing some specific feature in Nelm? Raise an issue or upvote/comment on the existing issue here.