Autodiscovery

In the lifecycle of a software project, dependencies are everywhere. From that third application used to lint our code, the tool used to build our documentation website, or the container image used to distribute our application. As the project grows, the number of dependencies grows as long. Some dependencies are context-dependent, and others are expressed using a standard data structure.

Updatecli is a great tool to handle both situations. It can either manage tailored update scenarios by using a manifest provided by a maintainer or automatically identify available update scenarios.

The latter approach removes the need to write a manifest. This behavior is referred to as "autodiscovery". With autodiscovery enabled, updatecli generates manifests in-memory before applying them (instead of reading manifests and applying).

A use case: a repository with a collection of Dockerfile`s. To keep the Dockerfiles' `FROM instructions up to date, writing one manifest file per Dockerfile isn’t practical. With autodiscovery enabled, Updatecli scans the repository for all Dockerfile and automatically tracks the FROM instruction to propose updates if needed. This helps us maintain our Dockerfile images without having to write manifests. Each autodiscovery scenario is handled by a crawler. The goal of the crawler is to recursively parse all files in a directory, looking for the pattern and then try to generate as many updatecli manifests as possible. Once all manifests have been generated, we run them as we would do with custom manifests, by running updatecli diff or updatecli apply. This autodiscovery is enabled by default and should work out of the box just by running one of the following commands.

As with any opinionated way of working, a bit of adaptability is required. The next part of this document covers the different kinds of customization that can be used with autodiscovery.

Autodiscovery could benefit from some customization, such as providing SCM configuration or defining pull request information. Some parameters are crawler specific and others apply to all crawlers.

If a updatecli manifest specifies the root key "autodiscovery", such as in the following example, then on top of the default autodiscovery, it enables an additional autodiscovery feature. Here we clone the epinio/helm-chart repository in a temporary location and then look in that location for all Helm charts that specify dependencies and we try to update them.

By default, autodiscovery looks for patterns from the local directory. We can also specify manifests from remote git repositories.