The Halon MTA is the most developer-friendly platform for email transport and security. With version 5.7 “catchy” we’re very happy to introduce an even better experience when using Halon together with Visual Studio Code and Docker Desktop.
Visual Studio Code is one of the most popular source code editor applications, made available for free and open source by Microsoft. It includes many features such as version control with Git, and has tons of available extensions. We have been using one of Visual Studio Code’s fundamental underpinnings, the Monaco code editor, in Halon’s web administration code editor since 2016. In 2018 we released a Visual Studio Code extension for working with both Halon script and YAML configuration files.
More and more customers embrace DevOps processes which combine version control (like Git), provisioning tools (like Chef, Puppet and Ansible) and containers (like Docker). This can improve both the speed and reliability of service development, especially with larger teams and deployments. In order to deliver the best possible experience regardless of which of those technologies our customers’ use, we’re now providing the different Halon components in smaller packages so that they can be integrated into your workflow. For example, you can now have the configuration packer and syntax highlighting in Visual Studio Code, connected to a local Docker instance running the Halon MTA and debugger. The container template enables you to set up a local development environment using Docker Desktop within minutes, complete with all MTA components.
Our extensions deliver syntax highlighting, code completion, built-in documentation, linting (static code analysis), debugging, staging and deployment. One of the most requested features is the debugger, leveraging Visual Studio Code’s breakpoint interface. It can be used on individual modules running inside the Halon script interpreter (hsh), or on a complete deployment by attaching to the MTA process (smtpd) of either a container or VM over SSH. Attaching to the MTA enables you to peek into the full connection and transaction context during not only development and staging, but also during for example troubleshooting of live traffic on production instances. Play the video below to see it in action!
What’s even more powerful is the combination of live debugging with what we call live staging; integrated blue-green testing which allows you deploy a new configuration (complete with all script and modules) for a small, select portion of traffic. It really highlights the unique capabilities which become possible because we develop the MTA, email scripting language and development environment hand-in-hand; as one product with a clear vision.
See the release notes and detailed changelog for a full list of changes. We hope that you will enjoy this new quarterly release. Don’t hesitate to contact us if you want to learn more about what we do, and how we enable email providers to build better services!