Easily restore prior versions in Galaxy
You can now see version history, build status, and more at a glance
Each time a developer deploys to Galaxy, it creates a new version of their app. Galaxy then attempts to build and run this new version. Unfortunately, mistakes happen. Sometimes, broken app code is deployed or a bug only turns up after deploying. Sometimes, the latest version doesn’t even run.
Usually the simplest way to deal with a bad deploy is to go back to an older working version. In the past, Galaxy customers needed to check out the source code from the old version, re-deploy it from scratch, and wait for Galaxy to build a new image from the old code. This was slow and manual, and impossible if you hadn’t kept track of what version control commit you’d deployed from. For all these reasons, developers using Galaxy have told us they wanted to be able to quickly and easily restore a known working version, and that’s exactly what we’re releasing today!
Meteor Galaxy now allows you to simply choose a working version and click to restore.
The new feature comes as part of a new Versions tab we’re adding to the interface. Developers will now be able to access a versions page which will allow them to better understand an app’s version history.
Each row displays a version’s last activation date, deployer, and build status, so you know exactly which versions failed and who deployed which version at a glance. A flag on the side indicates settings have changed between versions, while the row of the currently active version will be highlighted green.
You can now also easily see settings for past versions. Clicking the row will display more information about a version, showing settings, initial deployment date, and the restore options.
If settings differ between the current version and the version being shown, a warning will appear when attempting to restore, just so you have a heads up! This means you won’t accidentally restore settings with outdated information such as an old database password or missing environment variables.
The version page also displays live updates, so users can see a new version being deployed and build status being updated in real time.
Looking to the future, we’re excited about adding more information to this page that will be helpful to developers, such as incorporating the bundle visualizer now available in Meteor 1.5 and the ability to compare settings. If you have any ideas, as always, we’d love to hear them!
Klaire studies Computer Science at Yale and is joining us for the summer as an intern at Meteor. Be sure to follow along with her work on Twitter!
