Waypoint 0.9 Adds New Runner Commands

We are excited to announce the general availability of HashiCorp Waypoint 0.9. Waypoint is an application deployment tool that aims to deliver a PaaS-like experience for Kubernetes, Amazon ECS, and other platforms. Waypoint 0.9 adds several significant new features, including on-demand runner introspection commands, and an install command to provision runners to your selected platform. These commands allow operators to have more control over where runners are provisioned and how to gather information on what Waypoint is doing for remote-enabled projects.

»On-Demand Runner Introspection

In Waypoint 0.9, we introduced the CLI command waypoint task. This command

currently gives users more introspection into the task launcher system for On-Demand Runners and what Waypoint is doing with remote-enabled projects. The task CLI will give users more insight into what Waypoint server is doing as it schedules tasks to execute jobs for a project.

The simplest benefit to this command is listing all known tasks in the system:

This will display a list of all known tasks in the Waypoint server. It will show the current state of the task as well. If you inspect a specific task, it will show you all of the jobs that were launched by Waypoint:

This update pairs well with the new Evaluations UI in Nomad 1.3. If you run your Waypoint server on a Nomad cluster, you can now view info on past on-demand runner jobs via both waypoint job list, and also directly in the Nomad UI:

»New Runner Install/Uninstall Command

Waypoint’s server installation with waypoint install comes with an initial Waypoint static runner in the same platform where the server is installed. Waypoint 0.9 introduces a new command, waypoint runner install, to install a runner to a given platform. The same platforms supported for the server installation, Kubernetes, Amazon ECS, Docker,and HashiCorp Nomad, are also supported for runner installation with this new command.

By default, with this command, after the runner is installed and attempting to communicate with the Waypoint server at the provided address, the server will automatically adopt the new static runner, and create a runner profile targeting the new runner. Here is an example of installing a Waypoint runner to Docker with the new waypoint runner install command:

You can see that the installed runner has registered with the server and has been adopted, and a runner profile has been created with the ID of the new runner set as the target runner for the profile. This immediately enables the new static runner to begin creating on-demand runners for the server’s remote operations in the new platform:

This new command makes it easier than ever to install a static runner to your infrastructure, and to start remotely building, deploying, and releasing anywhere.

»One waypoint.hcl, One App

Since the initial release of Waypoint in 2020, the product has supported the ability to configure multiple apps within a single waypoint.hcl file. Starting with Waypoint 0.9, this functionality is deprecated and will be removed in 0.10. The vast majority of users are not using this functionality and it served mostly as a source of confusion. For users who are using a monorepo pattern, we plan to add better workflows for you.

With a waypoint.hcl now focused on the configuration of a single application, the concept of a project within the Waypoint data model will be removed, moving applications to the top level. This is already how users talk about using Waypoint and we are confident that it will improve the overall understanding of Waypoint as well.

If you have questions about this change in functionality, we invite you to discuss with us on this HashiCorp Forum thread or the Waypoint GitHub repository.

»Next Steps

The list of new features and improvements in Waypoint 0.9 is too long to detail here, so please see the CHANGELOG for a complete rundown. Finally, don’t miss these useful Waypoint resources:

• Download Waypoint 0.9 from the project website.
• If interested, sign up for the HCP Waypoint Private Beta Program.
• Learn more about Waypoint with tutorials on the HashiCorp Learn site.
• Contribute to the Waypoint open source project and participate in its community.
• Extend Waypoint by creating a plugin.

We hope you enjoy Waypoint 0.9!