Occasionally users report issues in our Discord. After a fix was found and committed, users wanted a way to verify their issue had been resolved before a release.

We build and distribute testing binaries and images each time we merge a pull request. However, walking users through this installation was error-prone, and you couldn’t easily swap back to stable. You needed to re-install.

Starting a cluster from an unofficial release wasn’t a straightforward process either. The Fluvio CLI is geared towards production users using official releases. An unofficial release cluster required setting a few extra CLI options to fluvio cluster start. An easy step to forget.

Inspired by Rust’s concept of channels, Fluvio’s release channels address these issues and provide an easy way to switch between development and stable releases.

Release channel support is provided by the official installer script. The installer uses the stable channel by default.

There are 3 channels for users to use.

This is the most recent release, and the default channel installed.

To switch to the stable channel:

$ fluvio version switch stable

This is the most recent commit to the master branch

To switch to the latest channel:

$ fluvio version switch latest 

The first time you switch to this channel, the binary will be downloaded.

This is a specific version.

To switch to a version channel, you need to create it first.

At this step the binary will get downloaded.

$ fluvio version create X.Y.Z 

Then you can switch to the version channel

$ fluvio version switch X.Y.Z 

Where X.Y.Z is the version of a release you want to switch to (e.g. 0.9.18)

Release channel support is set up at install time through the installer script.

2 binaries are installed

• The Fluvio CLI
• A frontend binary to support switching channels

By default, the stable channel is selected.

This channel is registered in ~/.fluvio/channel and is marked as the active channel.

Example channel config:

current_channel = "stable"
[channel.stable]
binary_location = "/home/username/.fluvio/bin/fluvio-stable"
extensions = "/home/username/.fluvio/extensions"
image_tag_strategy = "Version"

[channel.latest]
binary_location = "/home/username/.fluvio/bin/fluvio-latest"
extensions = "/home/username/.fluvio/extensions-latest"
image_tag_strategy = "VersionGit"

When you run fluvio update, the Fluvio binary of your current channel will update to the newest version of the channel.