UmbPack
Since last time we've seen UmbPack - our Umbraco CLI tool - being picked up by several people! 🎉
If you're in doubt about what UmbPack actually is, you can read more about it in the UmbPack documentation.
We've also had our first pull requests to the repo by Matt Brailsford and Bjarne Fyrstenborg 👏
The current release is now 0.9.5, and the new features include the following:
Specify contributors
When running the command to create a new package.xml file:
umbpack init
It will now also ask you to specify contributors- thanks a lot to Bjarne!
Override the package name
Previously the package name would be automatically created as [solutionname].[version].zip when you package it, but you may not want your package to have that specific naming convention, so thanks to a PR from Matt you can now override the name with a command line option:
umbpack pack .\package.xml -n ICanCallThisAnything.zip
Archive packages
Thanks yet again to Matt for his hard work, it is now possible to archive current package versions on Our when you push a new one with UmbPack. You can either send a set of strings to match a name to, or the string “current” to only archive the current package when you push a new one. We’ve gathered a few common examples in the docs that shows how this can be done.
Thanks a lot to our contributors for the hard work! H5YR!
If you have any questions, feel like contributing - or have some ideas to share about UmbPack then make sure to stop by the repo!
Package Templates
You may have seen a teaser Tweet from the Package Team Twitter account showing a scaffolding tool that helps you set up a fresh Umbraco site for package development by running a single command. It also allows you to add, for example, a dashboard with one command, so you can scaffold the thing you want really quickly.
The project is still young, but I recommend anyone interested in this to stop by the repo and take a look at it. Or you could go ahead and install the NuGet package right away and set up a site 😉
You can install the NuGet package like this:
dotnet new --install Umbraco.Tools.Packages.Templates::0.2.0
It currently has a dashboard item, Github action for building, packing and deploying your package and a Gulp script that watches the App_Plugins folder and adds changes to your website project for instant testing.
These templates can do way more things, and we hope the interest and demand for them are there so we can continue to add more examples and items to it!
Here is a preview of creating a fresh site with a dashboard and a github action:
Package Templates
Package workshops
Umbraco normally participates in Hacktoberfest, and this year the package team has decided to try something new - hosting package workshops. The specifics aren't there yet, but the idea is to set up some workshops on how to create a package, and how to get it distributed. We expect our workshops to go from nothing, to having a package on Our and NuGet, and we're currently looking for feedback on what they should cover more specifically.
So, if you have any ideas or feedback please let us know either on Twitter or by emailing packages@umbraco.com.
Keep tabs on the team
In the spirit of openness and transparency (and making it easier for ourselves 😁) we've decided in the package team to release our meeting notes for our biweekly meetings on Github; so if you feel like these blog posts aren’t enough, you can check our notes on our repo.
And remember to sign up for the Package newsletter!
Until next time!
Your next package update will be here for you in October!
If you have something you think should be highlighted in the coming package newsletter - please reach out to me on packages@umbraco.com!