Monokle Desktop 1.4.0 Release Notes

Another month - another release for Monokle - our open source desktop tool for making the lives of all dedicated kubernetes manifest/yaml herders out there a little/lot easier!

As always we’ve tried to pack a punch - lot’s of new features to enjoy, let’s dive in.

Form editors for the masses!

For those of you that don’t thrive in well-indented YAML - these are for you. Up until now Monokle has sported Form-based editing for ConfigMap resources only, now we’ve made the following additions:

1. All objects now have a form-based editor for the metadata section of the resource definition:

2. The following resource types have received their own form-based editors:

• ClusterRole
• ClusterRoleBinding
• Deployment
• Role
• RoleBinding
• Secret
• Service
  

As before Monokle will keep the source yaml in sync with what you put in the editor (preserving comments and ordering to the best of its ability).

New Resource improvements

Creating new resources has now been made substantially easier:

1. The New Resource dialog has improved logic and options

• Improved validation for all fields
• Option to directly save the created resource to a folder
  
  

2. You can now create new resources directly in the File Explorer from the folder popup menu:
   

• New resources can now be created directly from within the source editor - see below!

Moved Kustomize / Helm Sections

Kustomize and Helm sections now have their dedicated panels in the left part of the window.

instead of taking valuable space from your resources in the middle. If your folder contains kustomizations or helm charts these will now be available there instead, of course with maintained preview functionality.

Furthermore, we’ve moved kustomization patches away from the resource navigator (since they technically weren’t always resources) and now show them in the Kustomize tab as well - see bottom left in the screenshot above.

We’ve also added corresponding hotkeys so you can easily navigate to each the left tabs with your keyboard:

• File Explorer Tab: 'ctrl+shift+e, command+shift+e',
• Kustomize Tab: 'ctrl+shift+k, command+shift+k',
• Helm Tab: 'ctrl+shift+h, command+shift+h',
• Cluster Tab: 'ctrl+shift+c, command+shift+c',

Editor driven filtering and object-creation

The source editor has received some love;

• When hovering over an invalid name reference (to for example an ConfigMap that doesn’t exist), the popup will contain an action to create an object with the hovered name, which will open the New Resource dialog with name and kind prefilled accordingly - you just need to press OK to create the missing resource
  

• When hovering over a kind/namespace/label/annotation, the popup will contain an action to add/remove that to the current resource filter, making it super-easy to modify your resource filter as you browse through your resources. This is especially useful when browsing a cluster, as it allows you to quickly narrow down the resource filter to namespace, a specific label, etc.
  
  

Improvements to Cluster Compare

The cluster-compare functionality has been improved with the possibility to replace local resources with those in your cluster:

Links to Kubernetes documentation

To help you learn and understand Kubernetes resources we’ve added a documentation link to the top of the editor:

As before, the source editor already has context-sensitive popups containing links to corresponding documentation:

Lots of minor fixes and improvements

• Many dependency updates for improved security, performance, etc
• Many resource-ref processing improvements for validation and performance
• Bug-fixes!
  

That’s it for now,

• Download the release from GitHub
• Share your ideas, complaints and praise on our Discord Server
  

And Monokle 1.5.0 has even more manifest-goodness coming up - stay tuned by starring us on GitHub ;-)

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