v0.5.0

Changes

Version 0.5.0 includes lots of new features including:

• New user-friendly playbook editor
• Custom interfaces with event handling
  • Interfaces are no longer attached to apps; they are now their own plugins and are contained in the interfaces directory
  • Interfaces can use new decorator functions to listen and respond to all events in Walkoff as they occur
• Better triggers
  • Triggers are no longer specified in the database. Instead, each individual action in a workflow can have its own set of conditions which can act as breakpoints in a workflow. You can send data to them through the server and have that data validated against a set of conditions before the action can resume.
  • You can still start a workflow from the beginning through the server
• Renamed workflow components for clarity
  • "steps" have been renamed "actions"
  • "next steps" have been renamed "branches"
  • "flags" have been renamed "conditions"
  • "filters" have been renamed "branches"
• App-specific conditions and transforms
  • Conditions and transforms are now located in apps rather than in core, so they can be more easily created
• Script used to start the server has been renamed walkoff.py
• Host and port can now be specified on the command line
• Unfortunately, event-driven actions have been broken for some time now. We have removed this functionality, but are working on an even better replacement for them in the meantime
• Branches now contain a "priority" field which can be used to determine the order in which the branches of a given action are evaluated
• Arguments to actions, conditions, and transforms which use references can select which component of the referenced action's output to use.
• HTTPS is enabled by default if certificates are placed in the .certificates directory.
  This version introduces a variety of backward-breaking changes, but we have also included two scripts, migrate_workflows.py and migrate_api.py which should ease this transition.

Detailed changes

• We have removed accumulated risk from workflows and risk from steps. This feature will be readded at a future date
• We have removed widgets from the backend. This feature will be reimplemented later.
• Playbook file format changes
  • Branches are now contained outside of actions, creating two top-level fields.
  • Branches have a source_uid and a destination_uid instead of just a name field
  • The start step on a workflow is indicated with the start step's UID instead of its name
  • The app and action fields of actions, conditions, and transforms have been renamed app_name and action_name respectively.
  • Conditions and transforms contain an app_name field instead of just an action field
  • We have removed the widgets field and the risk field from actions
  • Devices for actions are specified by id rather than by name
  • Actions' inputs field, as well as conditions' and transforms' args field has been renamed arguments and is now a complete JSON object
  • Playbooks now contain a walkoff_version field which will be used to indicate which version of WALKOFF created them. This will be helpful in the future to migrate workflows to new formats
• ZeroMQ keys are contained in the .certificates directory
• Minor changes to api.yaml schema
  • dataIn has been renamed data_in
  • termsOfService has been renamed terms_of_service
  • externalDocs has been renamed external_docs and is always an array
• Scripts to create Sphinx documentation have been added to the repository
• Performance of worker processes has been improved by removing gevent from child processes and reducing polling
• The blinker Signals used to trigger events have been wrapped in a WalkoffEvent enum
• Internal sockets used for ZeroMQ communication have been moved to core.config.config
• Backend support for adding roles to users has been removed. All users are administrators as they have been in previous releases. There was never a UI component for this feature, and it was breaking some other components for editing users. Roles will be readded in the next release.
• Actions which are defined inside of a class must supply a device, or the workflow will fail on initialization
• The REST API to get the APIs of apps has been enhanced significantly and returns all of the API

Contributor changes

• Coverage.py is used to generate test coverage report. Travis-CI will fail if the code coverage is below 81% This percentage will rise over time