Cockpit 0.89 Released

category: release

Cockpit releases every week. Here’s a summary of the 0.87, 0.88 and 0.89 releases.

OSTree upgrades and rollbacks

Peter worked to finish the basic OSTree UI has been merged into Cockpit. This lets the admin perform upgrades and rollbacks on Atomic Host.

Colin, Peter and the OSTree guys worked together to build a DBus interface in rpm-ostree so that callers can interact with the update system.

Demo: https://youtu.be/Tmj0Nrkasmk

Before this is usable by users, the cockpit-ostree package will need to (be included in Atomic Host, first on Fedora)[https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1292826].

Custom login authentication scripts

The Cockpit WebService cockpit-ws component now supports custom authenticators for various auth mechanisms. Some assembly required.

Peter has implemented this as part of containerizing the kubernetes and docker registry admin dashboards.

https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit/blob/master/doc/authentication.md

Stubbed out bridge for non-local users

This means that the Cockpit parts can be customized to that we can allow non-local users to log in and interact with certain Cockpit components that don’t interact with the local system. Again this is part of containerizing the kubernetes and docker registry admin dashboards.

Specific dashboards can now be shown as default

A specific Cockpit dashboard can now be shown as the default when logging in, by specifying a lower “order” than default dashboard.

https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit/pull/3317

Fix login on Windows

Cockpit no longer prompts for a strange second login (which had to do with SSO) on Windows. There are some remaining issues with how Cockpit works on Internet Explorer, but most have been solved.

https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit/issues/2164

Host name in self-signed certificate

In order to make life easier, when generating a self-signed certificate, Cockpit now includes the local host name. Self-signed certificates remain a stop gap. Real world deployments should replace them with properly signed certificates from a certificate authority:

https://cockpit-project.org/guide/latest/https.html

Routine Debian testing

The Cockpit Project has started routinely testing each Cockpit pull request on Debian Unstable using real Debian packaging. Marius did some great work here. This means we’re are close to doing real continuous delivery to Debian. Next step, a repo, and a maintainer.

https://fedorapeople.org/groups/cockpit/status/debian-unstable.html

Case insensitive cockpit.conf

The cockpit.conf file is now case insensitive for options and headings. This should make editing it less error prone.

https://cockpit-project.org/guide/latest/cockpit.conf.5.html

Reorder graphs on server summary page

Thijs reordered the resource graphs on the server summary page in the same order as GNOME, Windows, and elsewhere.

Syncing of users when adding a server

Cockpit no longer requires or suggests that the admin accounts be synced between servers when adding another server to the dashboard. This feature is still available when editing the server options on the dashboard.

Weak dependencies on Fedora 24+

On Fedora 24 and later, one can have ‘Suggests’ and ‘Recommends’ dependencies between packages. Cockpit now takes advantage of these for its ‘cockpit’ meta package making certain parts removable without removing ‘cockpit’.

Vagrantfile working again

The Vagrant file now pulls from the correct latest binary builds of Cockpit. To use it:

$ git clone https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit
$ cd cockpit
$ sudo vagrant up

SOS Reporting

Users can now prepare an SOS Report containing information about the system and send it to their support representative.

From the future

Stef has done work to cleanup the Javascript dependencies of Cockpit. Broadly these fall into two categories:

  • Development dependencies: only used while developing Cockpit, not even used while building the tarball. These are node_modules

  • Runtime dependencies: used while Cockpit is running and built into the various Cockpit packages. These are bower_components

The latter should be replaceable at build-time. The cleanup work moves in this direction, but it’s not complete yet.

From the future

Ryan Barry has posted a pull request adding tuned (system performance profile) support to Cockpit:

https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit/pull/3279

Try it out

Cockpit 0.86 is available now: