I’ve posted a few times on the topic of Habitat. I feel its the most promising solution for software package management, and deployment available today. If I have managed to help sway you, and thus you’re interested in adopting Habitat, you may find yourself faced with a relatively daunting task. Migrating a working, functional system from one underlying layer to another is risky, potentially disruptive, and time consuming. All these reasons are why successful financial and enterprise businesses tend to have a slow rate of change.

This post has been a long time coming. For about 2 years, configuration plans (Also known as wrapper plans) have been a critical part of how I use and deploy Habitat plans/artifacts in the wild. They’re a super easy way to encapsulate some required software and bundle your own configuration. For some reason, finding information about this approach has previously been difficult due to a lack of documentation. Here’s an example of configuration plans for Habitat.

I’ve been contributing to Habitat for a little while now. Mostly in the capacity of contributions to core-plans, but occasionally some changes to the on-premise-builder and the Habitat project itself. I’ve posted about my reasons for preferring Habitat previously, today I want to focus on the evolution of my testing for Habitat. Initial testing, no automation The initial testing is similar to what all developers would currently be doing as they engage in Habitat day to day:

I recently did a complete overhaul of my website. The previous version was built with CakePHP, as a demonstration as I was working closed with CakePHP. Times change, and so do trends, and I try to keep ahead of it. Static site generators are gaining more popularity. I’ve been eyeing Hugo for some time, and decided it was time to refresh my website and try some new deployment options while I was at it.