Future and direction of git2consul

[calvn]

git2consul has steadily been gaining users since its early stages, and for that we thank you. This project would not have been nearly as successful without the involvement of the community, opening issues, contributing code, and just running the application.

As the project has evolved and increased in functionality as well as complexity, we wanted to take this chance to re-visit git2consul as a whole. We would like to take this opportunity make some announcements for the future and direction of git2consul.

We have invested some time and resources to develop a proof-of-concept port of git2consul in Go. Note that this version is highly-experimental, non-feature-complete, and not recommended for production. On a similar note, we would like to stress the fact that [node-]git2consul project and repository will not be immediately abandoned, and it will continue to be the recommended solution.

There are several reasons for this experiment. Primarily, it lets us leverage the ecosystem and native Go libraries that the folks at Hashicorp provide. Additionally, also allows us to re-examine the entire code base and give us the chance to make architectural changes to improve git2consul. Some of these changes, which will be part of the initial version of go-git2consul, include moving the configuration to the local system and removing runtime dependencies such as node and git (the latter done with the libgit2 library).

We tried to keep user-experience as similar as possible to the existing git2consul, so that our users would not need to familiarize with the tool once again. However, there might be some features that will be different, such as the webhook settings. go-git2consul is still under development and architectural decisions have not exactly been set in stone. You are more than welcome to contribute to the project if you think there is a better solution to a specific problem! The repository for go-git2consul can be found here.

This initiative was sparked by the community, more specifically by the request for file expansion on different extensions. As such, we would love to hear feedback from you about this decision.