Release on Barn

Farrow 0.8.0: clearer recovery and refreshed images

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0800

Farrow 0.8.0 reduces manual work after interrupted setup and partial VM starts. It also refreshes the Debian and Ubuntu images while retaining every previous Catalog artifact and the identity of existing VMs.

What changed

Host preparation follows the command. Interactive start, restart, and reload can prepare missing host tools and restore an intact Farrow network. On macOS, new network installation completes Homebrew discovery/installation or the verified archive download before requesting administrator authentication, so Homebrew cannot invalidate a credential acquired too early.
A failed node does not block independent peers. A missing host share fails its own node during up or start; stopped peers can still start when a new node fails to prepare. Errors name the source and mount, and Farrow does not create an empty replacement. Restart/reload/recreate check share access before stopping existing VMs.
Recovery preserves identity. A missing public key is derived from the original private key. A lost private key produces backup-recovery guidance instead of a new login identity. macOS vmnet log-directory recovery retains network ownership evidence and avoids false subnet-conflict reports.
Failures keep their context. Scoped retry commands preserve the inventory, repository, and applicable flags; a start retry remains start. Setup and its retry share one operation ID, and bounded event logs work before deployment state exists. Uncached image information no longer requires QEMU.
Cleanup reports the final result. Explicit persistent-disk deletion and purge no longer describe disks as both retained and deleted. Owned disks left by a previously removed node do not block destruction of the remaining lab.

September images

Embedded Catalog 2026092001 contains 37 artifacts across nine families, including all 27 previous artifacts. These new stable versions cover amd64 and arm64:

Farrow 0.7.0: simpler test labs and automatic recovery

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0800

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.

Farrow 0.6.0: Ubuntu 24.04 and smoother local labs

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0800

Farrow 0.6.0 defaults to Ubuntu 24.04 and improves the everyday loop of planning, starting, expanding, and rebuilding a local Pigsty lab.

What changed

Ubuntu 24.04 by default. New inventories and the embedded catalog use u24:stable. Catalog revision 2026090501 also includes the Debian 12/13 and Rocky Linux 8/9 updates already available in the official repositories.
Useful plans before setup. plan for Catalog images works without QEMU or host networking installed (registered local-* images still need qemu-img cache validation) and shows exact image versions, resource totals, pending starts, changed fields, disk effects, and commands that retain custom -f paths.
Readable status and errors. Status shows images, CPU, and memory; one damaged node no longer hides healthy peers. Corrupt state names the actual file and cause. Image digest failures return exit 7; SSH exit 255 passes through unchanged. --no-wait clearly reports that readiness was skipped.
Checks before disruption. Selected recreate detects conflicting peer changes before deleting disks. reload checks startup dependencies before stopping guests. Stop, destroy, and runtime cleanup handle deployment state consistently under the existing lock.
Guest names stay current. Starting commands and node removal refresh Farrow-managed guest hosts entries and control-node SSH configuration. Recreated peers remain reachable without clearing guest known_hosts. User SSH text and global option scope are preserved.
Fewer CLI surprises. Custom init paths produce usable next commands; presentation flags respect option values; malformed integer sizes and extra YAML documents are rejected without truncation. ALL_PROXY/all_proxy provides a fallback while respecting scheme-specific proxies and NO_PROXY.

Upgrade notes

Upgrading Farrow does not replace existing disks or change an explicitly selected image. If an old inventory relied on the implicit Debian 13 default, add vm_image: d13 under all.vars before applying it with 0.6.0. Review farrow plan before applying changes; farrow start uses the applied state.

Farrow 0.4.0: one command, working data disks, one voice

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0800

Farrow 0.4.0 was the public pre-1.0 release superseded by 0.5.0. It makes the first run one command, fixes the default data disk on Debian and Ubuntu images, and gives every command the same output style. The Pigsty Inventory format, the fixed-IP deployment model, the state layout, and the embedded Catalog revision 2026082903 are unchanged.

What changed

On a terminal, farrow up runs farrow setup itself when the fixed-IP network has never been installed, shows the setup plan, asks before the privileged step, and then continues. farrow init points at farrow up.
vm_disks[].fs defaults to auto: a blank disk is formatted XFS when the guest has mkfs.xfs and ext4 otherwise, the same choice Pigsty’s Vagrant flow makes. The old xfs default failed on Debian and Ubuntu images, which ship without xfsprogs. Deployments created with the old default are not reported as drift and their persistent disks stay compatible.
The guest error marker carries the failing command’s last message, so up reports guest bootstrap failed during data-disks: xfs requested but mkfs.xfs is unavailable instead of an exit status.
Lifecycle commands and status print a node table and, after up, a next: farrow ssh <node> hint. plan and validate print one line when nothing changes; image list, network status, doctor, and preflight errors use plain sentences without machine codes; spec hash and other internals moved to --json. Errors about an unknown node list the nodes.
farrow ssh <node> -- 'df -h /data; id' passes the remote command exactly as OpenSSH does.

Upgrading

A d13, d12, or Ubuntu node created by 0.3.0 or earlier whose /data never mounted needs one farrow recreate <node>; the disk is then formatted ext4 on those images and XFS on Enterprise Linux images. Automation that runs up on an unprepared host without a terminal still needs farrow setup --yes first.

Farrow 0.5.0: explicit disposal, explicit repositories, reproducible images

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0800

Note

This page describes 0.5.0. Official mirror failover was added in 0.7.0, and the unreleased 0.9 candidate removes the rm alias. Use current CLI guidance for your installed version.

Farrow 0.5.0 was the public pre-1.0 release superseded by 0.6.0. It adds an explicit command for disposable labs, makes repository geography an operator choice, and adds a reproducible path for preparing the next official guest images. The Pigsty Inventory contract, deployment state format, and embedded Catalog revision 2026082903 are unchanged.

Farrow 0.3.0: explicit catalogs and actionable readiness

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0800

Farrow 0.3.0 was the public pre-1.0 release superseded by 0.4.0. It removes implicit Catalog refreshes, turns guest bootstrap failures into actionable per-node results, and simplifies the CLI without changing the Pigsty Inventory or fixed-IP deployment model.

What changed

up, plan, and ordinary image commands use one active local Catalog snapshot and never fetch Catalog metadata implicitly. farrow update explicitly fetches the configured repository; image sync activates an exact URL or file.
Guest bootstrap writes an atomic failure stage. Partial operations report every failed node, stage, and error, and readiness failures point directly to farrow logs <node>.
Already-running guests can be rechecked without restarting QEMU. A partial lifecycle still rebuilds the SSH client configuration from every committed node.
Netplan matches deterministic MAC addresses without renaming interfaces. vm_disks[].fs: auto prefers XFS and falls back to ext4 when necessary.
The redundant ss command and ambiguous root/flag shorthands are removed. image reset replaces reset-manifest, which remains an alias.

Verification boundary

Source commit da6d02426da93c677c94c67fec4eb4fcecf4766a passed the complete local source gate and a full GoReleaser snapshot: unit and race tests, vet, Staticcheck, govulncheck, four target builds, image-pipeline and installer boundaries, archive/package parity, dependency licenses, SBOMs, and native Linux package verification. The tag workflow repeated those checks before the Release was made public.

Farrow 0.2.0: selected convergence and release integrity

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0800

Farrow 0.2.0 was the public pre-1.0 release superseded by 0.3.0. It keeps the Pigsty inventory and on-disk deployment format introduced by 0.1.0 while fixing the network and selected-convergence boundaries found during the final native replay.

What changed

A less-specific VPN exclusion such as 10.0.0.0/8 no longer blocks Farrow’s owned 10.10.10.0/24; equal or more-specific foreign routes, overlapping interfaces, occupied addresses, and a missing owned route still fail closed.
farrow up <node> downloads and prepares only the selected node. Desired inventory peers without state appear as absent; SSH/hosts/provisioning, UUID and port allocation, lifecycle commands, and persistent-disk checks use the committed node set without losing future scale-out intent.
New guests write # farrow-deployment-host and remove both that marker and the released # farrow-project-host marker before adding current host rows.
Command cancellation, structured output, confirmation, reload, diagnostic redaction, installer retention, and the smaller dependency graph from the unpublished intermediate work are included directly in 0.2.0.

Native and release evidence

The exact source commit completed a macOS arm64/HVF replay with MonoProxy active: selected u24-1 create/SSH/stop/start, incremental cached el9-1 create, two-node SSH, five explicit absent peers, and whole destroy all passed. On Ubuntu 26.04 amd64/KVM, the current Linux binary audited an existing four-node deployment and reached its control guest without mutation.