Farrow 0.7.0: simpler test labs and automatic recovery

Farrow 0.7.0 makes local test labs easier to start and recover. Repeat farrow up to finish interrupted work, retry incomplete guest setup, and refresh older guest helpers without restarting running VMs.

What changed

• A shorter first run. Interactive up can create the default inventory, prepare missing host tools, and restore an intact inactive Farrow network. Short checks stay quiet; long work shows progress and a compact final result.
• Usable guests stay available. Data disks, shares, guest hostnames, node-to-node SSH, and private networking initialize independently. Optional failures report specific limitations while working management SSH remains available. Healthy stages are skipped on subsequent up calls.
• Test disks recover automatically. Working filesystems are reused; unrecognized or confirmed damaged filesystems are reset and mounted again. The result explicitly reports discarded data. Probe errors, missing devices, busy mounts, and backend I/O errors do not trigger formatting.
• Fewer manual fixes. Unwritable shares fall back to read-only and retry after permissions are corrected. Occupied automatic SSH ports are reassigned for stopped guests. Interrupted image transfers resume, and official repositories can fail over without bypassing digest verification.
• Clearer output and state. Successful commands show a short summary; limitations are grouped, and JSON/YAML keep structured results. Guest warnings use a disposable cache outside the schema-2 VM documents and node artifact directories, so older releases can still read and manage the deployment.

Upgrade notes

Data disks are disposable test storage. up may clear a damaged filesystem, including one marked persistent. Persistence retains a disk across VM destroy/recreate; it does not preserve corrupt filesystem contents during recovery. Keep valuable data outside these test disks. Root disks and host shared directories are not reset by this recovery.

There is no separate repair command. Repeating up performs recovery; start continues to power on existing nodes without applying an inventory. --no-wait skips readiness and these guest recovery checks.

A usable guest with optional limitations returns exit 0. Automation that needs all configured features must inspect nodes[].warnings in JSON/YAML. Recovery actions, including data resets, appear in nodes[].repairs. Downgrading the CLI does not restore discarded data or revert installed guest helpers.

A pre-existing 0.6.0 bootstrap failure can already have deleted the staged control-node SSH key before installing it. up restores management access and independent setup, but reports control-ssh if that key is missing. It does not reinject private keys during an in-place retry. After reviewing disk effects with farrow plan, explicitly recreate the affected control node if peer SSH is needed.

Install or upgrade

curl -fLO https://github.com/pgsty/farrow/releases/download/v0.7.0/install.sh
chmod +x install.sh
FARROW_VERSION=0.7.0 ./install.sh
farrow version
farrow up

The release includes macOS/Linux amd64/arm64 archives, Linux DEB/RPM packages, the installer, checksums, SBOMs, and a Homebrew formula. It follows the existing pre-1.0 GitHub pre-release policy; specify FARROW_VERSION when installing.

Validation

The release commit is 9c6d4896d93733d1cb60a7e5d8591e9a06659c9d. It passed the source CI and the independent packaging snapshot before tagging. The tag workflow repeated the gates and produced 20 release assets: 19 checksummed payloads plus the checksum manifest. All 20 assets downloaded anonymously with HTTP 200 and matched the inspected bytes.

The public macOS arm64 and Linux amd64 installers installed the exact archive binaries and reported version 0.7.0 with this commit. On Ubuntu 26.04 amd64 with KVM/QEMU 10.2.1 and Ubuntu 24.04 guests, the recovery matrix exercised ext4/XFS corruption, retained disks, failed probes, busy mounts, read-only share fallback, and repeated healthy up without replacing the VM process. A public 0.6.0 bootstrap that failed its management-egress probe was resumed by 0.7.0 in 3.3 seconds; the existing data disk and UUID survived the probe failure. The old 0.6.0 binary still completed status, stop, start, and destroy after the upgrade. A fresh VM from the final 0.7.0 archive started without warnings, and a deliberately damaged disposable ext4 disk was reset by the public installer in 3.2 seconds with an explicit data-loss notice while the VM process stayed in place.

That interrupted 0.6.0 bootstrap may have deleted the staged control-node SSH key before installing it. Management SSH recovers, but peer SSH remains an explicit control-ssh limitation; the key is not reinjected during an in-place retry. Recreate the affected control node after reviewing farrow plan if peer SSH is required. Fresh 0.7.0 guests install the key normally.

macOS validation includes CLI smoke checks and cross-compilation. This release does not claim a new HVF guest replay, host reboot test, Linux arm64 run, or full Pigsty installation.