What is new in CubicWeb 3.27 ?

Hello CubicWeb community,

We are pleased to announce the release of CubicWeb 3.27. Many thanks to all the contributors of this release!

Main changes in this release are listed below. Please note this release drops python2 support.

Enjoy this new version!

New features

  • Tests can now be run concurrently across multiple processes. You can use pytest-xdist for that. For tests using PostgresApptestConfiguration you should be aware that startpgcluster() can't run concurrently. Workaround is to call pytest with --dist=loadfile to use a single test process per test module or use an existing database cluster and set db-host and db-port of devtools.DEFAULT_PSQL_SOURCES['system'] accordingly.

  • on cubicweb-ctl create and cubicweb-ctl pyramid, if it doesn't already exist in the instance directory, the pyramid.ini file will be generated with the needed secrets.

  • add a --pdb flag to all cubicweb-ctl command to launch (i)pdb if an exception occurs during a command execution.

  • the --loglevel and --dbglevel flags are available for all cubicweb-ctl instance commands (and not only the pyramid one)

  • following "only in foreground" behavior all commands logs to stdout by default from now on. To still log to a file pass log_to_file=True to CubicWebConfiguration.config_for

  • add a new migration function update_bfss_path(old_path, new_path) to update the path in Bytes File-System Storage (bfss).

  • on every request display request path and selected controller in CLI

  • migration interactive mode improvements:

  • when an exception occurs, display the full traceback instead of only the exception

  • on migration p(db) choice, launch ipdb if it's installed

  • on migration p(db) choice, give the traceback to pdb if it's available, this mean that the (i)pdb interactive session will be on the stack of the exception instead of being on the stack where pdb is launched which will allow the user to access all the relevant context of the exception which otherwise is lost

  • on DBG_SQL and/or DBG_RQL, if pygments is installed, syntax highlight sql/rql debug output

  • allow to specify the instance id for any instance command using the CW_INSTANCE global variable instead of or giving it as a cli argument

  • when debugmode is activated ('-D/--debug' on the pyramid command for example), the HTML generated by CW will contains new tags that will indicate by which object in the code it has been generated and in which line of which source code. For example:

<div cubicweb-generated-by="cubicweb.web.views.basetemplates.TheMainTemplate" cubicweb-from-source="/home/user/code/logilab/cubicweb/cubicweb/web/views/basetemplates.py:161" id="contentmain"> <h1 cubicweb-generated-by="cubicweb.web.views.basetemplates.TheMainTemplate" cubicweb-from-source="/home/user/code/logilab/cubicweb/cubicweb/view.py:136"> unset title </h1> [...] </div>

While this hasn't been done yet, this feature is an open path for building dynamic tools that can help inspect the page.

  • a new debug channels mechanism has been added, you can subscribe to one of those channels in your python code to build debug tools for example (the pyramid custom panels are built using that) and you will receive a datastructure (a dict) containing related information. The available channels are: controller, rql, sql, vreg, registry_decisions
  • add a new '-t/--toolbar' option the pyramid command to activate the pyramid debugtoolbar
  • a series of pyramid debugtoolbar panels specifically made for CW, see bellow

Pyramid debugtoolbar and custom panel

The pyramid debugtoolbar is now integrated into CubicWeb during the development phase when you use the 'pyramid' command. To activate it you need to pass the '-t/--toolbar' argument to the 'pyramid' command.

In addition, a series of custom panels specifically done for CW are now available, they display useful information for the development and the debugging of each page. The available panels are:

  • a general panel which contains the selected controller, the current settings and useful links screenshot1
  • a panel listing all decisions taken in registry for building this page screenshot2
  • a panel listing the content of the vreg registries screenshot3
  • a panel listing all the RQL queries made during a request screenshot4
  • a panel listing all the SQL queries made during a request screenshot5

Furthermore, in all those panels, next to each object/class/function/method a link to display its source code is available (shown as '[source]' screenshot6) and also every file path shown is a traceback is also a link to display the corresponding file (screenshot7). For example: screenshot8.

Backwards incompatible changes

  • Standardization on the way to launch a cubicweb instance, from now on the only way to do that will be the used the pyramid command. Therefore:
  • cubicweb-ctl commands "start", "stop", "restart", "reload" and "status" have been removed because they relied on the Twisted web server backend that is no longer maintained nor working with Python 3.
  • Twisted web server support has been removed.
  • cubicweb-ctl wsgi has also been removed.
  • Support for legacy cubes (in the 'cubes' python namespace) has been dropped. Use of environment variables CW_CUBES_PATH and CUBES_DIR is removed.

  • Python 2 support has been dropped.

  • Exceptions in notification hooks aren't catched-all anymore during tests so one can expect tests that seem to pass (but were actually silently failing) to fail now.

  • All "cubicweb-ctl" command only accept one instance argument from now one (instead of 0 to n)

  • 'pyramid' command will always run in the foreground now, by consequence the option --no-daemon has been removed.

  • DBG_MS flag has been removed since it is not used anymore

  • transactions db logs where displayed using the logging (debug/info/warning...) mechanism, now it is only displayed if the corresponding DBG_OPS flag is used

Deprecated code drops

Most code deprecated by version 3.25 or older versions has been dropped.