Introduction

Updatecli is a command line tool that applies update strategies described in a manifest. It runs the same way on a local machine and from a CI environment, and it needs no server and no database: the manifest and the files it updates are the only state.

A manifest is a YAML file declaring what to update, where, and under which conditions. Updatecli reads it and executes each pipeline in three stages, always in this order:

Two more building blocks turn that into a complete workflow:

Deciding how, when, and where to update information is hard.

Many tools apply continuous delivery or continuous deployment. We configure our infrastructure with Ansible playbooks, Puppet manifests, Helm charts, and others, and we rely on configuration files to specify the version we want to install. Unfortunately, too often those files are updated by hand, because it is hard to detect automatically what needs updating, and when.

The logic that manipulates a value in a configuration file lives outside that configuration file. The value itself comes from somewhere else again: a Maven repository, a Docker registry, a Git repository, an API. And before changing anything, we should validate our assumptions.

Updatecli combines blocks, called plugins, to express what needs to be updated, when, and where, so the workflow that suits your project can be written down and replayed.

Writing manifests by hand is only the entry point.