Hello again, world! - a day ago

Friday, August 29th 2025, 8:54am by mikejw

A new website has been launched! And this is coinciding with a wave of new Empathy development that has been happening recently to open source the pre-existing platform specific features of the codebase.

Of course, the deployment of the new version of this website has been achieved using the latest development version of Empathy with some of the platform specific abilities that are now beginning to show up within the Base Docker development branch. I.e. the code within the "test" and "proxy" directories.

The same philosophy is driving this wave of development, where bdcli is driving the functionality available in the base-docker repo. This means that a test server (with Jenkins) running on Vagrant on your network is nearly end-to-end deployable in a self-hosted manner using a publicly facing proxy through Tailscale (and Caddy). There is still some work to do to make sure Jenkins is configured automatically and secured. Also I want Empathy to automatically create dummy Jenkins jobs, perhaps using public dummy application git repos.

Also the goal is that Ansible vault secrets being managed locally by bdcli can be synced to the Jenkins and made available during pipline builds using the same secret key but set up as a secured Jenkins managed credential.

Once this is all done the next phase will be looking at bringing in the idea of a privately managed git server (possibly also through Tailscale) that Jenkins can talk to meaning that hopefully it might be possible to walk through with a user the creation of a brand new project using bdcli and move them towards committing the code and then deploying publicly within minutes.

Also the final step will be the deployment of new production servers from bdcli.

Anyway, thanks for your continued interest in this project. This is all that has been happening recently. Hopefully you find what is going on here as interesting as how we're finding it to work on.

Peace!

Progress Bars! - 2 months ago

Friday, June 20th 2025, 6:53am by mikejw

New BDCLI release that now displays progress bars when underlying Ansible playbook commands are running.

Download BDCLI from the GitHub releases page here.

PHP 8.4 Support - 3 months ago

Wednesday, May 28th 2025, 3:00pm by mikejw

The Empathy project has reached an exciting new milestone, with Empathy MVC version 4. Bringing support for PHP 8.4 to the framework for the first time. This is being applied across the platform as the default. Refer to the docs to get started!