Jun 23, 2023 2 min read Fermentrack

Fermentrack Release - 2023-06-23

This PR introduces a number of substantial changes from the previous release of Fermentrack.

I am proud to announce the latest major release of Fermentrack - over a year in the making.

Major Changes

BrewPi-Script Manager Rewrite

Since the early days of Fermentrack, Circus has been used to launch & manage individual instances of brewpi-script for each individual BrewPi Device. Unfortunately, Circus imposes a number of upstream dependencies that make keeping Fermentrack up-to-date an extremely onerous task. This PR replaces Circus with a custom BrewPi-Script management daemon.

Backup/Restore Refactor

The original implementation of backup/restore relied on an internal Django management command to read the database and write out database object descriptions to a JSON file. Although this works in theory, in practice this means that the backup is fairly dumb given that it is not aware of the nuance of Fermentrack's object relationships.

This PR replaces the use of the internal Django management command with new logic that generates a "smart" backup, which includes a Fermentrack-generated (rather than database-driven) representation of Fermentrack objects in JSON.

Changes from the previous logic when using newly-generated backups

Backup/restore no longer requires a fresh installation of Fermentrack for restoration to work
Backup/restore will no longer restore user accounts
Restoring controllers will no longer restart logging if they were logging when the backup was generated
Restoring controllers will no longer trigger a temperature profile to be applied if one was applied when the backup was generated

UUIDs

As part of the backup/restore refactoring, I have added UUIDs to every object that is likely to be exported. These UUIDs allow Fermentrack to recognize when an object in a backup file already exists in the Fermentrack database, and will update that object (rather than attempting to install a second instance).

New Upgrade Workflow

Unfortunately, Docker resets containers to their "downloaded" state which means that the previous upgrade workflow no longer functions as intended. The ability to "upgrade from GitHub" has now been removed in favor of providing instructions on how to re-run the install script which pulls the latest image from Docker Hub.

TiltBridge Jr (New Tilt Bluetooth support)

The existing Tilt Bluetooth daemon has been removed in favor of a new, standalone bluetooth daemon called "TiltBridge Jr." This should hopefully allow for Tilt support to be upgraded/improved independently from Fermentrack while simultaneously providing a better experience.

Full Changelog

Added

BrewPi-Script instances are now controlled via a custom process manager
Officially added arm64v8 to supported platforms
Added support for new versions of the BrewPi Firmware for certain ESP-based BrewPi Controllers
Added support for extended settings on new BrewPi Firmware for certain ESP-based BrewPi Controllers
Added board types for ESP32, ESP32-C3, and ESP32-S2
Added examples for HTTPS support (Thanks @HuggableShark)
Added UUIDs to most exportable objects to allow for easier import/export
Added "TiltBridge Jr." (new Tilt bluetooth daemon) support

Changed

Removed Circus support in favor of managing processes via Supervisord
Removed libzmq requirement
Removed environment tests for Tilt hydrometers (Obviated via Docker)
Switch to use latest LTS version of Django
Update to Python 3.9
Changed most references to ESP8266 to reference ESP32 as appropriate
Rewrote backup & restore functions to no longer rely on Django management code
Changed restoration of legacy backups to explicitly utilize the staging folder
Removed GitHub upgrade workflow from UI

Removed

Removed Fermentrack-specific Bluetooth daemon - now handled by TiltBridge Jr.