The LTS releases for v12 and v14 are already end of life and the v16 is
end of life in under two months from now on. Bump supported version up
to v18 as it does not make sense to continue to support EOL releases.
Even if we wanted to keep supporting them, our dependencies will not.
Note that Node.js v18 is currently not avaliable via the NodeSource PPA
on Ubuntu 19.10 and below or Debian 9 and below.
Reverse the direction of the API for sending messages from
messageDefinition.send(link, { content });
to
link.send(new MessageClass(content));
and convert all message definitions to use the JSON serialisable class
pattern and explicit registration of message handlers, along with a
end-to-end based routing of messages instead of link to link.
The experience I gained from the existing way messages were defined and
sent over links was that it was difficult to understand for people
unfamiliar with the system. The automatic registration of message
handlers ment that code was being called as if by magic from nowhere
with no easy way to discover it. The manual forwarding and rules for
what can be sent where and how obscured its working.
The use of pure JSON as both input and output from message handlers made
it tedious to work with. Data had to be manually converted between the
program representation and the over the wire format, which made handler
code unplesant to write. Particularly because the over the wire format
used snake_case while the program code uses camelCase for variables.
The idea behind the decision to do it this way was to make it more clear
which data came from the wire and which from the program, and while this
worked it didn't make message handlers any nicer to write.
The direction of the API and magic registration of message handlers also
meant that a future migration to TypeScript would be troublesome. While
it may be possible to implement, the degree of TypeScript magic required
would go starkly against the principle of keep it simple stupid.
By refactoring to using the JSON serialisable class pattern most of
these issues go away. There is no longer a need to distinguish the on
wire format of messages with the program representation because the only
place that deals with the wire format of messages are the toJSON and
fromJSON methods on the classes themselves. Message handlers will work
with proper instances of classes instead of raw data, something that
makes them easier to write, and trivial to type with TypeScript.
End-to-end routing also simplifies sending messages that need to do
mulitple hops to reach the destination. And removes the need for having
all messages be specified in plugin's info module, as they can be routed
without having to be parsed completely.
The explicit registration of message handlers is something that I
thought would be tedious boilerplate code that could be automated away.
But experience now shows it to be the opposite. Allthough dull
repetition, the purpose it serves is to link together the code in a way
that humans can easily find. With explicit registration searching the
name of the message handler in the editor will show the registration that
ties it together with the type of message it handles and the kind of
registration. With implicit registration searching the name of the
message handler turns up only the handler with no clue as to what calls
it.
Change the JSON seriasiable data classes to use an explicit static
fromJSON method and an optional toJSON method for turning them to and
from JSON.
This improves over the previous pattern of passing the JSON to the
constructor as it frees up the constructor to be able to take whichever
argument types suits the code instead of being beholden to the JSON
serialised form.
The role of a slave as a host for Factorio servers is not well reflected
in its name and has caused confusion among users. Rename slave to host
to better reflect its role as a host of Factorio servers.
The role of the master server as the party controlling every part of the
cluster is not well reflected in its name and has caused confusion among
users on several occasions. Rename master to controller to better
reflects its role.
Be a bit more accurate in the online time stat name and call it for what
it is. It counts time spend online on the server, not necessarily
time spent playing.
Add command that extracts play time (and players) from the currently
running save to the recorded instance statistics. This is useful for
getting correct play time statistics when an existing save game is
imported.
The prepare script runs before publishing a package, after installation
of a package from source, and when running npm install without
arguments in the repository. These are the times where a build of the
web interface files are required to make the web interface work and
removes a manual step from using the package(s). The "build" script on
the other hand is never automatically invoked by npm.
Save disk space, time and sanity by replacing npm and lerna with pnpm.
This is more performant and doesn't have developer experience ruining
bugs like npm link removing all previous links before creating the
requested one.
Travis seems to be going away from supporting Open Source Software for
free and their proceedure to gaining free tokens is getting harder and
hander to find for each year that passes. Remove Travis CI integration
and migrate the coverage reporting previously provided by the Travis
build over to the GitHub Actions.
Provide a convenience method for checking if the Master-Slave link is
fully online via a .connected property. This is true if the link has
been establised, is not in the dropped state, and not in the process of
disconnecting.
Refine the state flow used in the connector abstractions to better
handle close while connecting and resuming. The new logic is to close
the connection immediately in these two states instead of continuing
trying to connect and then giving up some point later.
For the connectors the handshake state is split into connecting
and resuming, new is replaced by closed, and the closing state is turned
into a boolean flag as it's possible that closing is desired while
connecting, connected or resuming. The connecting state is not present
in the server connector because there's nothing for the server to do in
that connector state.
The timeout logic is completely removed, once a connection attempt is
started for the client it will continue to attempt to connect, attempt
to resume dropped connections and attempt reconnects until either an
authentication error occurs or the client explicitly requests to close
the connection.
A new session timeout is added to control how long to attempt to resume
the connection until it's considered dead and invalidated. This allows
stale connections to give up earlier, and swallow up less data while in
the dropped but not yet invalidated state.
For the client side sending messages while it's connecting has been
changed to throw an error instead of queuing up the message and
(possibly) sending it after the connection is established. Code
shouldn't try to send messages without knowing if the connection it's
trying to send them over is active or not.
In order to import a path inside packages/lib/ in the webpack shared
module environment it has to be declared as shared in both the web_ui
webpack config and the plugin's webpack config. This is rather error
prone and easy to miss. Move the burden of specifying which entrypoints
are valid in lib to lib itself by changing all imports in the web
interface code to import from @clusterio/lib instead sub paths.
For web code this means imports is done like this from now on:
import { libConfig, libLink } from "@clusterio/lib";
For info.js which has to be loadable by both Node.js and web code the
imports are done as follows:
const { libConfig, libLink } = require("@clusterio/lib");
While the Node.js only code can either continue to import sub paths
directly or use the info.js style.
Convert code indents to tabs to be consistent with the rest of the
JavaScript code. This commits covers all of the lua code, some of the
hand written JSON code and the lone HTML and CSS files that were not
using tabs.
Add /api/upload-save endpoint that streams the data via the slave
assigned to the target instance to the instance saves directory, along
with a ctl command and web interface button to do the upload.
Simplify the the way markdown files are formatted to make them easier to
author without editors that do auto line breaking, and make the diffs
from them simpler to read.
Rename the config and status indicating whether to load a plugin or not
from "Enabled" to "Load Plugin". The latter better describes what it
does, and unlike the former doesn't imply plugins can be enabled or
disabled on the fly.
Add a per field access parameter to the config class which specifies
which of master, slave and control can access the given field. A
location is added to the config class to specify which party owns it and
fields which do not have an access parameter are not present in the
config and will throw if attempted to be read from or writen to.
The serialize, load, update, get, set and setProp are ammended with a
location parameter which specifiy where the data is from or destined to
and the access checks are performed to ensure remote access to the
config is still limited by the access parameter of field.
With this system in place the master config can be shared with control
and slave connections without compromising secrets that should stay
private. This is primarily the master authentication secret, but other
plugins may define secrets it does not want to have shared with slave
and/or control connections.
Raise "resume" instead of "connect" when a connection is re-established
after a connection drop. This prevents logic meant to resynchronize
state after a full reconnection from being invoked whenever the
connection was temporarily dropped.
Replace old paragraph in the developing for clusterio document about the
removed HTTP interface with a notice of the new protocol running over
WebSocket.
Add optional arguments to Request and Event to control which properties
are required to be present in the payload. This allows gracefully
extending the protocol, reducing overhead for optional data, and leaving
properties out for additional behaviour.
Add settings of interest to server administrators that appear in
server-settings.json to the factorio.settings config. This makes it
easier to see which settings can be set there.
The automatic creation of a self-signed certificate while nice presents
several problems. To make connections not reject the self-signed
certificate the validation of TLS certificates are wholesale disabled,
decreasing the security even when properly set up and trusted
certificates are used.
To make the created self-signed certificate pass validation it is
necessary for it to list the host names it's valid for and to copy it to
each machine that intends to connect to the server. These two steps
complicate automating the process in a reliable way and will likely lead
to confused users seeking to disable TLS certificate validation as the
easy way out to problems.
For these reasons, remove the automating creation of a broke self-signed
certificate, fix validation of certificates and document how to set up
TLS properly. This makes HTTPS recommended when accessing over the
internet, but still something which must be explicitly configured.
When reducing the collection interval in Prometheus it may be necessary
to to reduce the metrics gathering timeout to ensure it's less than the
interval. Add config options to adjust the timeouts used for metrics
gathering so that these can be set accordingly.
Add winston based logger for master, slave, ctl, lib, and web_ui code.
Logging done from slaves and instances are sent to the master server and
tagged with the instance and/or slave it originated from. This allows
for example error messages to propagate back to the source that iniated
the action. The master server also stores the log to allow it to be
queried at a later point. For slaves a copy of the slave's log is also
stored locally.
Hornwitser