Dear Butler, please meet Docker

Support for running Butler as a Docker container is finally here.

While it is still possible to run Butler as a normal Node.js app, deploying Butler as a Docker container has many benefits:

• No need to install Node.js on your server(s)
• Make use of your existing Docker runtime environments, or use those offered by Amazon, Google, Microsoft etc.
• Benefit from the extremely comprehensive tools ecosystem (monitoring, deployment etc) that is available for Docker.
• Updating Butler to the latest version is as easy as doing a "docker pull ptarmiganlabs/butler:latest".

Enjoy!

Dependency updates

• No feature changes in this release.
• Updated library dependencies to latest versions.

Butler 2.1

Long time coming, the 2.1 version includes bug fixes, updated dependencies and a couple of breaking changes.
This is not a major new upgrade, rather an incremental one.

There are no new features in this release, rather the opposite.
The REST endpoint for retrieving free disk space has been removed. It was just too hard to get working on Windows, and required quite different installation depending on what OS Butler runs on.

The change from JSON to YAML as the format for config files is not a breaking change - the JSON files should still work - but you are highly recommended to switch to YAML, simply because YAML is a lot more human readable, it will thus be easier to spot typos in the config files.
Additionally, YAML supports the use of comments, which always a good thing.

Butler is now using Qlik's official Enigma.js library for its communication with the Qlik Sense engine.

Full change log available here.

Butler 2.0 - the everything-is-new version

Butler 2.0 is a total re-write of Butler.

Where version 1.x was created to solve various needs in an ad-hoc way, v2.0 attempts to take a more structured approach. The source code is split into logical parts to simplify maintenance, the APIs are versioned etc. All in all Butler 2.0 offers way more features in an (hopefully) easier to understand and better documented way.

Butler 1.1 - Getting real time events from the Sense logs

Butler 1.1 adds a couple of significant features, namely real-time forwarding of user audit events (i.e. when a user connects to/disconnects from Sense), and real-time notifications when tasks started from the Sense QMC fails.
Both these event types are forwarded to the Slack channels of choice, the user audit events are also forwarded to MQTT for very convenient use in other systems.

Documentation has been refreshed to include the above features.

Butler 1.0 is out - the Qonnections release!

Various cleanup and refactoring:

• Source code comments added/updated
• Re-write of README file so it reflects current status of code base
• Added code for /mqttPublishMessage endpoint
• Added ButlerInit sub for handling one-off inits
• Added handling on session and connection events, forwarding them to Slack and MQTT