Maintain your server
Care and grooming of your Tatin server.
Curate the tags
The most important maintenance job is to curate the tags.
Tags can be very useful for finding a package, but package authors may use different tags for the same thing, use legal but different spelling (UK versus US) or invalid spelling, or tags that make no sense, such as the group name or dyalog etc.
To be useful, tags needs curating.
A package’s tags are defined in its configuration file. Merely changing the config file is enough: the server watches for such changes and adds the new config to the package ZIP, thus updating it.
Create and run maintenance jobs to correct problems in the package config files.
Maintenance jobs
The Maintenance Folder holds maintenance jobs in the form of APL function files (APLFs). The downloaded server includes some examples.
If a job crashes, the server
- reports it to the log file
- emails a report to the maintainer (see config)
- renames the file from
*.aplfto*.crashedto stop it being run again
If the server finds APLFs in the Maintenance Folder during housekeeping, it loads and executes them.
Once executed, a file is renamed by adding an extension .executed,
so it is not run again.
That also documents what jobs were executed, and when.
For example, a file RemoveDyalogFromTags.aplf gets loaded into an unnamed namespace and called with a right argument G (for globals).
Once executed, the file is renamed to RemoveDyalogFromTags.aplf.executed.
User command:
]Maintenance
Update the server
Download the release ZIP from the Releases page into a temporary folder and unzip it.
Read the release note before doing anything else.
An update could require taking the server down for maintenance.
By default, a running Tatin server watches the workspace on disk and reloads it if it changes. This makes for an easy update if no other action is required.
The automatic update can be switched off in the INI file with [CONFIG]ReloadWS.
While reloading the workspace, the server returns error messages. Expect this to last 10 seconds or more, depending on the number of packages managed.
The INI file
The update might add or remove settings in the INI file: consult the release note.
If there are changes, follow instructions in the note.
Do not replace the INI file.
The server monitors the INI file for changes, and re-initialises if it finds them. Whether that works depends on the change: some settings are used at an early stage and cannot be changed later. Again, the release note will tell.
Assets
The release note describes what action to take, if any.
Often the subfolder docs/ is to be replaced. (Contains the documentation.)
Maintenance folder
Never replace the Maintenance Folder
The folder maintenance/ documents changes made to the packages:
you don’t want to lose this.
If the new folder is not empty, copy its content over. Maintenance files can be used to carry out changes on all or some of the packages managed by the server, like adding a new property to the package config files of all packages.