Release 5 FAQ

What's new?

• Support for PostgreSQL (including Amazon RDS and Google Cloud SQL)
• API responses are Gzipped to make everything faster
• Development command line has changed from alertad to alertad run
• Major code refactor with flatter structure (beware imports! see next)
• WSGI import has changed from from alerta.app import app to simply from alerta import app
• Plugins import has changed from from alerta.app import app to from alerta.plugins import app
• Blackout is now a plugin so it can be disabled and replaced with a custom blackout handler
• Switched to using wheels for distribution via PyPI See http://pythonwheels.com/
• Alerta API now supports multiple roles for BasicAuth (though not supported in the web UI yet)
• Alert format: value is now always cast to a string.
• Added /management/housekeeping URL to replace housekeepingAlerts.js cron job script
• DATABASE_URL connection URI setting replaces every other MongoDB setting with a non-mongo specific variable

What's not?

• Alerta API should be compliant with version 4 (though some bug fixes in v5 mean it's not perfect)
• Alerta web UI and alerta CLI should work with both Alerta server v4 and v5

What's Still To Do?

• update documentation
• fix example code
• some complex URL queries for Postgres are incomplete
• complete regression testing eg. lots of vagrant boxes
• "official" docker image does not support Postgres, yet

FAQ

Q. Why?

A. People have been asking for PostgreSQL support for a long time.

Q. What's next?

A. Don't know... websockets?