A Flurry of Balrog Activity

This past quarter I spent some time modernizing Balrog's toolchain to make it more approachable. We've switched from Vagrant to Docker, cleaned up setup.py, started using tox, and updated the sample data included in the repo. At the same time, I started identifying some good first bugs, and put together a proposal for a Summer of Code project.

I feel very lucky that this work has paid off so quickly. There's been great interest in the Summer of Code project, and we've had 5 new volunteers submit patches to Balrog. These people are doing really great work, and I'd like to highlight their contributions today (in no particular order).

Njira Perci

Njira has focused on UI improvements, and has already improved the confirmation dialog for deleting Rules and added the ability to autocomplete Products and Channels in form fields. She continues to hack away and is now working on improving the Releases UI to highlight whether or not a release is active in any way.

Ashish Sareen

Ashish fixed a bug where the Admin server would hit an ISE 500 under certain conditions. With his patch, it now correctly returns a 400 error to the client.

Varun Joshi

Varun has been diving deep into the Admin server. He started off by fixing a small bug where some weirdly formed Releases caused ISE 500s, and has since provided a patch that gives us the ability to mark Releases as "read only". This is something we intend to make use of in our new Release Promotion system to guard accidental (or malicious...) changes to Release metadata.

Aybüke Özdemir

Aybüke enhanced the UI to show rule_ids, which makes it esaier for humans to find them when they need to put them into a script or automation.

Kumar Rishabh

Kumar fixed a very annoying bug where diffs of different versions of Releases would be generated against the wrong base version, making them essentially useless.

You?

If you would like to get involved in the development of Balrog, we'd love to have you. The wiki page can get you bootstrapped, and you can find us all on irc.mozilla.org in #balrog.