Plastic SCM Sign Up Information

Plastic SCM now supports sync with GitHub LFS!

You can run the sync operation and it''ll automatically pull/push your large files from/to the storage if your git repository is configured to use LFS.

''Sync with Git'' available in Linux and macOS

We added the ''Sync with Git'' option under the Push/Pull context menu in the branch explorer and branches views. From now on, you won''t have to use the command line to sync your git repositories in Linux or macOS.

See how it works in Linux and macOS.

C?dice and Unity

We have been for almost two months officially at Unity now and the experience has been great so far. The team is growing rapidly (check out our team page) and we expect to be able to focus on many more things. About 6 new team members onboarding during the next month ??

DevOps - Changes in the WebSockets library

We replaced the WebSockets library we used for SignalR. This translates into a more stable .NET Core server. The .NET Framework version of the server is not affected by these changes.

If you are using the DevOps features (the WebSocket connection) from outside the Plastic SCM Server (a bot or a plug not managed by the server itself), please pay attention to the changes.

Force detailed progress when redirecting output

When you run cm update, switch, or setselector, you get an animated progress bar in the console while the client updates your workspace.

Normally, if you redirected command output, we don''t show the progress bar. But now you can force output of the progress bar by specifying --forcedetailedoutput. For example:

cm update . --forcedetailedprogress > update.log

ignore.conf for Unity workspaces

Both Plastic SCM and Gluon can auto-detect Unity projects inside your workspace, and auto-generate a ignore.conf accordingly.

The clients automatically generate the ignore.conf file after updating an empty workspace if it contains a Unity project in order to correctly set up the files the should be ignored.

Launch GUI diffs using program arguments

Plastic SCM for windows already was able to launch the diffs for a branch/changeset/a pair of changesets using the command line arguments. Now, we extended this functionality for all the GUIs (Plastic and Gluon) in all platforms (win/gtk/macOS). For example (Windows platform):

Show branch diffs:

plastic.exe --diffbranch=br:/main@myrepo@myserver:8087

Show changeset diffs:

plastic.exe --diffchangeset=cs:2@myrepo@myserver:8087

Show diffs between two changesets:

plastic.exe --diffchangesetsrc=cs:0@myrepo@myserver:8087 --diffchangesetdst=cs:2@myrepo@myserver:8087

Dockerizing our CI plugin test environments

Docker is a fantastic virtualization tool that became a game changer when it was released a few years back. Initially Linux-only, it''s now a powerful system that enables users to save time setting up test environments regardless of the OS they use. That''s a remarkable feature, especially when you''re working with an extensible, multi-platform system such as Plastic SCM.

We''re introducing Docker in our regular development to bring time spent setting up environments to a minimum. That translates in a greater throughput in our release pipeline, which esentially means more features for you, faster!

Plastic SCM VS Code extension - Out now!

Visual Studio Code is a nice little editor by Microsoft that is incredibly popular at the moment. We use it here at C?dice Software, too. Our websites, the Plastic SCM Server WebUI, some client plugins... All those are often modified and extended using Visual Studio Code.

And now, you can have Plastic SCM information embedded in VS Code!

Branching patterns

Our eyes go wide open when someone writes about branching.

Author is Martin Fowler, so it gets serious. Don''t miss his compilation of branching patterns.

We go deep about branches in The Plastic Book. But Fowler is another level!

Announcing a new Plastic Cloud: cloud2

As we introduced in our latest newsletter, cloud2 is now here!

In this blog post, you can learn what cloud2 offers. Not only speed but new features.

PSPlasticBisect - a PowerShell module to bisect your repository

Bisecting a repository consists in making a binary search looking for the changeset where someone introduced a specific change.

In this blog post, our teammate Sergio presents you PSPlasticBisect, a PowerShell module that implements a bisect algorithm and some nice functions to test each changeset and determine whether it is correct or incorrect.

New htop command for plasticd shell

Just run plasticd shell in your server, then htop and a beautiful console based UI as follows will show up:

It is also possible to analyze specific requests and filter:

Improved the performance of deserialization code

The metadata deserialization is now about 30% faster than before this task. This makes deserializing big trees, branch explorers, and so on, faster than before.

Web triggers for Plastic SCM Cloud are here!

You can now hook web triggers to Plastic SCM operations. It has been a reality for years on the on-premises Plastic SCM Server, but now Plastic Cloud also supports it!

Do you remember we recently released cloud2? Web triggers is one of the new features in the new Cloud.

Migrating from cloud1 to cloud2

We are happy to announce we are migrating all our cloud users to Plastic SCM cloud2. This process will finish in a few weeks. From that moment, you can enjoy all the new cloud2 features and its better performance.

Of course, if you have any questions, please don''t hesitate to contact us at support@codicesoftware.com. We will be more than happy to help!

The WebAdmin/WebUI supports HTTPS now!

The web server will automatically use the first certificate you configured in your network settings. This means that the web interface will use the same certificate you use for your Plastic SCM SSL connections automatically, without any further configuration. If you don''t have any SSL ports defined in your server network configuration, only the HTTP endpoint will start.

• The WebAdmin/WebUI HTTP endpoint will still listen on port 7178 by default, but from now on it will be bound to localhost only! So you won''t be able to access WebAdmin/WebUI from other machines. If that''s what you want, you''ll either need to setup HTTPS or use a reverse proxy.
• The WebAdmin/WebUI HTTPS endpoint will listen on port 7179 by default. You can configure that port using the ''WebAdminToolSslPort'' setting in server.conf. This endpoint will listen on any network interface.

If you change the certificate you use for the SSL port at some point, make sure you restart the server to refresh the certificate information in the WebAdmin/WebUI.

DevOps in our .NET Core server is available for macOS

Remember the built-in DevOps feature we bundle in our Plastic SCM Servers out-of-the-box?

Well, we lacked of this feature in macOS platform. Wait no more! Now it''s available for Mac OS "Server .NET Core installer" and "Server .NET Core bundle".

.net core Plastic SCM Server on Windows Server Core

Let us share how to create a minimalist Microsoft Windows installation to host our new .net Core Plastic SCM Server.

LDAP connections now support StartTLS!

We improved the security of connections to the LDAP database by enabling StartTLS.

There should be no configuration change required. If your LDAP server supports StartTLS, any new connections will automatically be made secure.

Note: You should connect to port 389.

New option for daily rolling logger

We have added option MaxDays for the daily rolling file appender. It controls that log files of more than MaxDays days old will be deleted. NOTE: this replaces the option MaxFileCount.

This new option improves the control over log file directory sizes for multi-instance servers. For multi-instance, several log files can be created each day. So, limiting the age of log files is more useful than limiting the number of log files.

We''re getting ready for the new cloud2!

cloud2 is a greatly improved version of Plastic Cloud. The new version will feature an entire constellation of servers around the world, not just storage places like in the current cloud.

This means when you try to connect your_org@cloud, it won''t automatically resolve to server cloud.plasticscm.com, but it will retrieve the right server for your region.

Jet backend - New configuration settings

• Jet can now store blobs and metadata in different paths. So, it is now possible to put metadata in faster storage, and blobs in slightly slower one. Read how to configure them.
• Limit the number of repositories that have the Jet caches enabled. The server keeps caches for 500 repositories. The server selects 10% of the least recently used repositories and cleans their caches when it reaches the 500 repos limit. Now, you can configure both values. Read how to do it.
• Jet allows configuring the max amount of memory used by caches. When the process reaches the memory limit, it starts to clean the caches of the least recently used repositories. The server will clean the configured percentage of the total number of caches. By default, there is no memory size limit. Read how to configure it.

New PKG installer for our .NET Core server

This PKG installer contains our brand new Plastic SCM .NET Core server for macOS. We strongly recommend to upgrade to this new product if you are running servers on macOS. We will deprecate the old server soon.

Bear in mind that the current installer just supports Team and Enterprise editions. It doesn''t support Cloud Edition yet - which is bundled with the client anyway.

Upgrading to this new version preserves the already existing server configuration and license files.

Secure LDAP connections now supported on port 636

We added support to the Plastic server for SSL connections to your LDAP server. Configure your server (using the plasticd configure command, or the web based administration tool) to switch the LDAP port from 389 to 636 to take advantage of a secure connection to LDAP, assuming your LDAP server is configured to support this.

New .NET Core-based Proxy for Linux

We bundled a new Linux package to distribute our Proxy server, this time using the .NET Core runtime. You can install it by targeting the package plasticscm-proxy-server-netcore. It''s incompatible with the .NET Framework version plasticscm-proxy-server but you can install it alongside a Plastic SCM server.

Unity plugin - Local project packages for versioning

Now, the local project packages are considered for versioning. This means their folders and contents will appear in the ''Pending changes'' view of ''Version Control'' window in Unity when they contain any change.
This feature is available for Unity 2019.3 or later.