CHANGELOG.md

v0.13.0

The primary motivation for this release is to add support for fetching images on the Docker Registry 2.0. It also includes other small improvements.

• docker2aci: support Docker Registry 2.0 (#1826)
• always use https:// when fetching docker images (#1837)
• stage0: add container hash data into TPM (#1775)
• host flavor: fix systemd copying into stage1 for Debian packaging (#1811)
• clarify network error messages (#1707)
• documentation: add more build-time requirements (#1834)

v0.12.0

rkt v0.12.0 is an incremental release with UX improvements like fine-grained security controls and implicit generation of empty volumes, performance improvements, bug fixes and testing enhancements.

New features and UX changes

• implement rkt cat-manifest for pods (#1744)
• generate an empty volume if a required one is not provided (#1753)
• make disabling security features granular; --insecure-skip-verify is now --insecure-options={feature(s)-to-disable} (#1738). See rkt's Global Options documentation.
• allow skipping the on-disk integrity check using --insecure-options=ondisk. This greatly speeds up start time. (#1804)
• set empty volumes' permissions following the spec (1803)
• flannel networking support in kvm flavor (#1563)

Bug fixes

• store used MCS contexts on the filesystem (#1742)
• fix Docker images with whiteout-ed hard links (#1653)
• fix Docker images relying on /dev/stdout (#1617)
• use authentication for discovery and trust (#1801)
• fix build in Docker (#1798)
• fix kvm networking (#1530)

Improved testing

• add functional tests for rkt api service (#1761)
• fix TestSocketActivation on systemd-v219 (#1768)
• fix the ACE validator test (#1802)

Other changes

• Bumped appc spec to 0.7.3 (#1800)

v0.11.0

rkt v0.11.0 is an incremental release with mostly bug fixes and testing improvements.

New features and UX changes

• support resuming ACI downloads (#1444)
• rkt image gc now also removes images from the store (#1697)

Build

• handle building multiple flavors (#1683)
• verbosity control (#1685, #1686)
• fix bugs in make clean (#1695)

Improved testing

• nicer output in tests (#1698)
• refactor test code (#1709)
• skip CI tests when the source was not modified (#1619)
• better output when tests fail (#1728)
• fix tests in 10.* IP range (#1736)
• document how to run functional tests (#1736)

Improved documentation

• add some help on how to run rkt as a daemon (#1684)

API service

• do not return manifest in ListPods() and ListImages() (#1688)

Bug fixes

• parameter --mount fixed in kvm flavour (#1687)
• fix rkt leaking containers in machinectl on CoreOS (#1694, #1704)
• rkt status now returns the stage1 pid (#1699)
• fix crash in rkt status when an image is removed (#1701)
• fix fd leak in store (#1716)
• fix exec line parsing in ACI manifest (#1652)
• fix build on 32-bit systems (#1729)

v0.10.0

rkt v0.10.0 is an incremental release with numerous bug fixes and a few small new features and UX improvements.

New features and UX changes

• added implementation for basic API service (rkt api-service) (#1508)
• mount arbitrary volumes with --mount (#1582, #1678)
• --net=none only exposes the loopback interface (#1635)
• better formatting for rkt help (#1597)
• metadata service registration (--mds-register) disabled by default (#1635)

Improved documentation

• compare rkt and other projects (#1588)
• Stage 1 systemd Architecture (#1631)
• packaging rkt in Linux distributions (#1511)

Improved testing

• new test for user namespaces (--private-users) (#1580)
• fix races in tests (#1608)

Bug fixes

• suppress unnecessary output when --debug is not used (#1557)
• fix permission of rootfs with overlayfs (#1607)
• allow relative path in parameters (#1615)
• fix pod garbage collection failure in some cases (#1621)
• fix rkt list when an image was removed (#1655)
• user namespace (--private-users) regression with rkt group fixed (#1654)

v0.9.0

rkt v0.9.0 is a significant milestone release with a number of internal and user-facing changes.

There are several notable breaking changes from the previous release:

• The on-disk format for pod trees has changed slightly, meaning that rkt gc and rkt run-prepared may not work for pods created by previous versions of rkt. To work around this, we recommend removing the pods with an older version of rkt.
• The --private-net flag has been renamed to --net and its semantic has changed (in particular, it is now enabled by default) - see below for details.
• Several changes to CLI output (e.g. column names) from the rkt list and rkt image list subcommands.
• The image fetching behaviour has changed, with the introduction of new flags to rkt run and rkt fetch and the removal of --local - see below for details.

New features and UX changes

--private-net --> --net, and networking is now private by default

The --private-net flag has been changed to --net, and has been now made the default behaviour. (#1532, #1418) That is, a rkt run command will now by default set up a private network for the pod. To achieve the previous default behaviour of the pod sharing the networking namespace of the host, use --net=host. The flag still allows the specification of multiple networks via CNI plugins, and overriding plugin configuration on a per-network basis. For more details, see the networking documentation.

New image fetching behaviour

When fetching images during rkt fetch or rkt run, rkt would previously behave inconsistently for different formats (e.g when performing discovery or when retrieving a Docker image) when deciding whether to use a cached version or not. rkt run featured a --local flag to adjust this behaviour but it provided an unintuitive semantic and was not available to the rkt fetch command. Instead, rkt now features two new flags, --store-only and --no-store, on both the rkt fetch and rkt run commands, to provide more consistent, controllable, and predictable behaviour regarding when images should be retrieved. For full details of the new behaviour see the image fetching documentation.

Unprivileged users

A number of changes were made to the permissions of rkt's internal store to facilitate unprivileged users to access information about images and pods on the system (#1542, #1569). In particular, the set-group-ID bit is applied to the directories touched by rkt install so that the rkt group (if it exists on the system) can retain read-access to information about pods and images. This will be used by the rkt API service (targeted for the next release) so that it can run as an unprivileged user on the system. This support is still considered partially experimental. Some tasks like rkt image gc remain a root-only operation.

/etc/hosts support

If no /etc/hosts exists in an application filesystem at the time it starts running, rkt will now provide a basic default version of this file. If rkt detects one already in the app's filesystem (whether through being included in an image, or a volume mounted in), it will make no changes. (#1541)

Other new features

• rkt now supports setting supplementary group IDs on processes (#1514).
• rkt's use of cgroups has been reworked to facilitate rkt running on a variety of operating systems like Void and older non-systemd distributions (#1437, #1320, #1076, #1042)
• If rkt run is used with an image that does not have an app section, rkt will now create one if the user provides an --exec flag (#1427)
• A new rkt image gc command adds initial support for garbage collecting images from the store (#1487). This removes treeStores not referenced by any non-GCed rkt pod.
• rkt list now provides more information including image version and hash (#1559)
• rkt image list output now shows shortened hash identifiers by default, and human readable date formats. To use the previous output format, use the --full flag. (#1455)
• rkt prepare gained the --exec flag, which restores flag-parity with rkt run (#1410)
• lkvm stage1 backend has experimental support for rkt enter (#1303)
• rkt now supports empty volume types (#1502)
• An early, experimental read-only API definition has been added (#1359, #1518).

Bug fixes

• Fixed bug in --stage1-image option which prevented it from using URLs (#1524)
• Fixed bug in rkt trust's handling of --root (#1494)
• Fixed bug when decompressing xz-compressed images (#1462, #1224)
• In earlier versions of rkt, hooks had an implicit timeout of 30 seconds, causing some pre-start jobs which took a long time to be killed. This implicit timeout has been removed. (#1547)
• When running with the lkvm stage1, rkt now sets $HOME if it is not already set, working around a bug in the lkvm tool (#1447, #1393)
• Fixed bug preventing run-prepared from working if the metadata service was not available (#1436)

Other changes

• Bumped appc spec to 0.7.1 (#1543)
• Bumped CNI and netlink dependencies (#1476)
• Bumped ioprogress to a version which prevents the download bar from being drawn when rkt is not drawing to a terminal (#1423, #1282)
• Significantly reworked rkt's internal use of systemd to orchestrate apps, which should facilitate more granular control over pod lifecycles (#1407)
• Reworked rkt's handling of images with non-deterministically dependencies (#1240, #1198).
• rkt functional tests now run appc's ACE validator, which should ensure that rkt is always compliant with the specification. (#1473)
• A swathe of improvements to the build system
  • make clean should now work
  • Different rkt stage1 images are now built with different names (#1406)
  • rkt can now build on older Linux distributions (like CentOS 6) (#1529)
• Various internal improvements to the functional test suite to improve coverage and consolidate code
• The "ACI" field header in rkt image output has been changed to "IMAGE NAME"
• rkt image rm now exits with status 1 on any failure (#1486)
• Fixed permissions in the default stage1 image (#1503)
• Added documentation for prepare and run-prepared subcommands (#1526)
• rkt should now report more helpful errors when encountering manifests it does not understand (#1471)

v0.8.1

rkt v0.8.1 is an incremental release with numerous bug fixes and clean-up to the build system. It also introduces a few small new features and UX improvements.

• New features and UX changes:
  • rkt rm is now variadic: it can now remove multiple pods in one command, by UUID
  • The APPNAME column in rkt image list output has been changed to the more accurate NAME. This involves a schema change in rkt's on-disk datastore, but this should be upgraded transparently.
  • Headers are now sent when following HTTP redirects while trying to retrieve an image
  • The default metadata service port number was changed from a registered/reserved IANA port to an arbitrary port in the non-dynamic range
  • Added the ability to override arguments for network plugins
  • rkt will now error out if someone attempts to use --private-users with the lkvm backend
• Bug fixes:
  • Fixed creation of /tmp in apps' root filesystems with correct permissions
  • Fixed garbage collection after umounts (for example, if a system reboots before a pod is cleanly destroyed)
  • Fixed a race in interactive mode when using the lkvm backend that could cause a deadlock or segfault
  • Fixed bad parameter being passed to the metadata service ("uid" -> "uuid")
  • Fixed setting of file permissions during stage1 set up
  • Fixed a potential race condition during simultaneous iptables invocation
  • Fixed ACI download progress being sent to stderr instead of stdout, now consistent with the output during retrieval of Docker images
  • rkt help prepare will now show the correct default stage1 image
  • rkt will refuse to add isolators with nil Limits, preventing a panic caused by an ambiguity in upstream appc schema
• Other changes:
  • Reworked the SELinux implementation to use systemd-nspawn's native context-switching feature
  • Added a workaround for a bug in Docker <1.8 when it is run on the same system as rkt (see rkt#1210 (comment))
  • Added a rkt-xxxx-tapN name to tap devices that rkt creates
  • Functional tests now clean intermediate images between tests
  • Countless improvements and cleanup to the build system
  • Numerous documentation improvements, including splitting out all top-level rkt subcommands into their own documents

v0.8.0

rkt 0.8.0 includes support for running containers under an LKVM hypervisor and experimental user namespace support.

Full changelog:

• Documentation improvements
• Better integration with systemd:
• journalctl -M
• machinectl {reboot,poweroff}
• Update stage1's systemd to v222
• Add more functional tests
• Build system improvements
• Fix bugs with garbage-collection
• LKVM stage1 support with network and volumes
• Smarter image discovery: ETag and Cache-Control support
• Add CNI DHCP plugin
• Support systemd socket activation
• Backup CAS database when migrating
• Improve error messages
• Add the ability to override ACI exec
• Optimize rkt startup times when a stage1 is present in the store
• Trust keys fetched via TLS by default
• Add the ability to garbage-collect a specific pod
• Add experimental user namespace support
• Bugfixes

v0.7.0

rkt 0.7.0 includes new subcommands for rkt image to manipulate images from the local store.

It also has a new build system based on autotools and integration with SELinux.

Full changelog:

• New subcommands for rkt image: extract, render and export
• Metadata service:
  • Auth now based on tokens
  • Registration done by default, unless --mds-register=false is passed
• Build:
  • Remove support for Go 1.3
  • Replace build system with autoconf and make
• Network: fixes for plugins related to mnt namespace
• Signature: clearer error messages
• Security:
  • Support for SELinux
  • Check signature before downloading
• Commands: fix error messages and parameter parsing
• Output: reduce output verbosity
• Systemd integration: fix stop bug
• Tests: Improve tests output

v0.6.1

The highlight of this release is the support of per-app memory and CPU isolators. This means that, in addition to restricting a pod’s CPU and memory usage, individual apps inside a pod can also be restricted now.

rkt 0.6.1 also includes a new CLI/subcommand framework, more functional testing and journalctl integration by default.

Full changelog:

• Updated to v0.6.1 of the appc spec
• support per-app memory and CPU isolators
• allow network selection to the --private-net flag which can be useful for grouping certain pods together while separating others
• move to the Cobra CLI/subcommand framework
• per-app logging via journalctl now supported by default
• stage1 runs an unpatched systemd v220
• to help packagers, rkt can generate stage1 from the binaries on the host at runtime
• more functional tests
• bugfixes

v0.5.6

rkt 0.5.6 includes better integration with systemd on the host, some minor bug fixes and a new ipvlan network plugin.

• Updated to v0.5.2 of the appc spec
• support running from systemd unit files for top-level isolation
• support per-app logging via journalctl. This is only supported if stage1 has systemd v219 or v220
• add ipvlan network plugin
• new rkt subcommand: cat-manifest
• extract ACI in a chroot to avoid malformed links modifying the host filesystem
• improve rkt error message if the user doesn’t provide required volumes
• fix rkt status when using overlayfs
• support for some arm architectures
• documentation improvements

v0.5.5

rkt 0.5.5 includes a move to cni network plugins, a number of minor bug fixes and two new experimental commands for handling images: rkt images and rkt rmimage.

Full changelog:

• switched to using cni based network plugins
• fetch images dependencies recursively when ACIs have dependent images
• fix the progress bar used when downloading images with no content-length
• building the initial stage1 can now be done on various versions of systemd
• support retrying signature downloads in the case of a 202
• remove race in doing a rkt enter
• various documentation fixes to getting started and other guides
• improvements to the functional testing using a new gexpect, testing for non-root apps, run context, port test, and more

v0.5.4

rkt 0.5.4 introduces a number of new features - repository authentication, per-app arguments + local image signature verification, port forwarding and more. Further, although we aren't yet guaranteeing API/ABI stability between releases, we have added important work towards this goal including functional testing and database migration code.

This release also sees the removal of the --spawn-metadata-svc flag to rkt run. The flag was originally provided as a convenience, making it easy for users to get started with the metadata service. In rkt v0.5.4 we removed it in favor of explicitly starting it via rkt metadata-service command.

Full changelog:

• added configuration support for repository authentication (HTTP Basic Auth, OAuth, and Docker repositories). Full details in Documentation/configuration.md
• rkt run now supports per-app arguments and per-image --signature specifications
• rkt run and rkt fetch will now verify signatures for local image files
• rkt run with --private-net now supports port forwarding (using --port=NAME:1234)
• rkt run now supports a --local flag to use only local images (i.e. no discovery or remote image retrieval will be performed)
• added initial support for running directly from a pod manifest
• the store DB now supports migrations for future versions
• systemd-nspawn machine names are now set to pod UUID
• removed the --spawn-metadata-svc option from rkt run; this mode was inherently racy and really only for convenience. A separate rkt metadata-service invocation should be used instead.
• various internal codebase refactoring: "cas" renamed to "store", tasks to encapsulate image fetch operations, etc
• bumped docker2aci to support authentication for Docker registries and fix a bug when retrieving images from Google Container Registry
• fixed a bug where --interactive did not work with arguments
• garbage collection for networking is now embedded in the stage1 image
• when rendering images into the treestore, a global syncfs() is used instead of a per-file sync(). This should significantly improve performance when first extracting large images
• added extensive functional testing on semaphoreci.com/coreos/rkt
• added a test-auth-server to facilitate testing of fetching images

v0.5.3

This release contains minor updates over v0.5.2, notably finalising the move to pods in the latest appc spec and becoming completely name consistent on rkt.

• {Container,container} changed globally to {Pod,pod}
• {Rocket,rocket} changed globally to rkt
• rkt install properly sets permissions for all directories
• rkt fetch leverages the cas.Store TmpDir/TmpFile functions (now exported) to generate temporary files for downloads
• Pod lifecycle states are now exported for use by other packages
• Metadata service properly synchronizes access to pod state

v0.5.2

This release is a minor update over v0.5.1, incorporating several bug fixes and a couple of small new features:

• rkt enter works when overlayfs is not available
• rkt run now supports the --no-overlay option referenced (but not implemented!) in the previous release
• the appc-specified environment variables (PATH, HOME, etc) are once again set correctly during rkt run
• metadata-service no longer manipulates IP tables rules as it connects over a unix socket by default
• pkg/lock has been improved to also support regular (non-directory) files
• images in the cas are now locked at runtime (as described in #460)

v0.5.1

This release updates Rocket to follow the latest version of the appc spec, v0.5.1. This involves the major change of moving to pods and Pod Manifests (which enhance and supplant the previous Container Runtime Manifest). The Rocket codebase has been updated across the board to reflect the schema/spec change, as well as changing various terminology in other human-readable places: for example, the previous ambiguous (unqualified) "container" is now replaced everywhere with "pod".

This release also introduces a number of key features and minor changes:

• overlayfs support, enabled for rkt run by default (disable with --no-overlayfs)
• to facilitate overlayfs, the CAS now features a tree store which stores expanded versions of images
• the default stage1 (based on systemd) can now be built from source, instead of only derived from an existing binary distribution as previously. This is configurable using the new RKT_STAGE1_USR_FROM environment variable when invoking the build script - see fdcd64947
• the metadata service now uses a Unix socket for registration; this limits who can register/unregister pods by leveraging filesystem permissions on the socket
• rkt list now abbreviates UUIDs by default (configurable with --full)
• the ImageManifest's readOnly field (for volume mounts) is now overridden by the rkt command line
• a simple debug script (in scripts/debug) to facilitate easier debugging of applications running under Rocket by injecting Busybox into the pod
• documentation for the metadata service, as well as example systemd unit files

v0.4.2

• First support for interactive containers, with the rkt run --interactive flag. This is currently only supported if a container has one app. #562 #601
• Add container IP address information to rkt list
• Provide /sys and /dev/shm to apps (per spec)
• Introduce "latest" pattern handling for local image index
• Implement FIFO support in tar package
• Restore atime and mtime during tar extraction
• Bump docker2aci dependency

v0.4.1

This is primarily a bug fix release with the addition of the rkt install subcommand to help people setup a unprivileged rkt fetch based on unix users.

• Fix marshalling error when running containers with resource isolators
• Fixup help text on run/prepare about volumes
• Fixup permissions in rkt trust created files
• Introduce the rkt install subcommand

v0.4.0

This release is mostly a milestone release and syncs up with the latest release of the appc spec yesterday.

Note that due to the introduction of a database for indexing the local CAS, users upgrading from previous versions of Rocket on a system may need to clear their local cache by removing the cas directory. For example, using the standard Rocket setup, this would be accomplished with rm -fr /var/lib/rkt/cas.

Major changes since v0.3.2:

• Updated to v0.4.0 of the appc spec
• Introduced a database for indexing local images in the CAS (based on github.com/cznic/ql)
• Refactored container lifecycle to support a new "prepared" state, to
• pre-allocate a container UUID without immediately running the application
• Added support for passing arguments to apps through the rkt run CLI
• Implemented ACI rendering for dependencies
• Renamed rkt metadatasvc -> rkt metadata-service
• Added documentation around networking, container lifecycle, and rkt commands

v0.3.2

This release introduces much improved documentation and a few new features.

The highlight of this release is that Rocket can now natively run Docker images. To do this, it leverages the appc/docker2aci library which performs a straightforward conversion betwen images in the Docker format and the appc format.

A simple example:

$ rkt --insecure-skip-verify run docker://redis docker://tenstartups/redis-commander
rkt: fetching image from docker://redis
rkt: warning: signature verification has been disabled
Downloading layer: 511136ea3c5a64f264b78b5433614aec563103b4d4702f3ba7d4d2698e22c158

Note that since Docker images do not support image signature verifications, the -insecure-skip-verify must be used.

Another important change in this release is that the default location for the stage1 image used by rkt run can now be set at build time, by setting the RKT_STAGE1_IMAGE environment variable when invoking the build script. (If this is not set, rkt run will continue with its previous behaviour of looking for a stage1.aci in the same directory as the binary itself. This makes it easier for distributions to package Rocket and include the stage1 wherever they choose (for example, /usr/lib/rkt/stage1.aci). For more information, see rkt#520

v0.3.1

The primary motivation for this release is to resynchronise versions with the appc spec. To minimise confusion in the short term we intend to keep the major/minor version of Rocket aligned with the version of spec it implements; hence, since yesterday v0.3.0 of the appc spec was released, today Rocket becomes v0.3.1. After the spec (and Rocket) reach v1.0.0, we may relax this restriction.

This release also resolves an upstream bug in the appc discovery code which was causing rkt trust to fail in certain cases.

v0.3.0

This is largely a momentum release but it does introduce a few new user-facing features and some important changes under the hood which will be of interest to developers and distributors.

First, the CLI has a couple of new commands:

• rkt trust can be used to easily add keys to the public keystore for ACI signatures (introduced in the previous release). This supports retrieving public keys directly from a URL or using discovery to locate public keys - a simple example of the latter is rkt trust --prefix coreos.com/etcd. See the commit for other examples.
• rkt list is an extremely simple tool to list the containers on the system

As mentioned, v0.3.0 includes two significant changes to the Rocket build process:

• Instead of embedding the (default) stage1 using go-bindata, Rocket now consumes a stage1 in the form of an actual ACI, containing a rootfs and stage1 init/exec binaries. By default, Rocket will look for a stage1.aci in the same directory as the location of the binary itself, but the stage1 can be explicitly specified with the new -stage1-image flag (which deprecates -stage1-init and -stage1-rootfs). This makes it much more straightforward to use alternative stage1 images with rkt and facilitates packing it for different distributions like Fedora.
• Rocket now vendors a copy of the appc/spec instead of depending on HEAD. This means that Rocket can be built in a self-contained and reproducible way and that master will no longer break in response to changes to the spec. It also makes explicit the specific version of the spec against which a particular release of Rocket is compiled.

As a consequence of these two changes, it is now possible to use the standard Go workflow to build the Rocket CLI (e.g. go get github.com/coreos/rocket/rkt will build rkt). Note however that this does not implicitly build a stage1, so that will still need to be done using the included ./build script, or some other way for those desiring to use a different stage1.

v0.2.0

This introduces countless features and improvements over v0.1.1. Highlights include several new commands (rkt status, rkt enter, rkt gc) and signature validation.

v0.1.1

The most significant change in this release is that the spec has been split into its own repository (https://github.com/appc/spec), and significantly updated since the last release - so many of the changes were to update to match the latest spec.

Numerous improvements and fixes over v0.1.0:

• Rocket builds on non-Linux (in a limited capacity)
• Fix bug handling uncompressed images
• More efficient image handling in CAS
• mkrootfs now caches and GPG checks images
• stage1 is now properly decoupled from host runtime
• stage1 supports socket activation
• stage1 no longer warns about timezones
• cas now logs download progress to stdout
• rkt run now acquires an exclusive lock on the container directory and records the PID of the process

v0.1.0

• tons of documentation improvements added
• actool introduced along with documentation
• image discovery introduced to rkt run and rkt fetch

v0.0.0

Initial release.