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Pulp's Blog

  • 1 min read

Syncing Files from a Webserver or an S3 Bucket

The pulp-manifest tool is designed to generate PULP_MANIFEST files for the Pulp File plugin. pulp-manifest has been recently significantly enhanced with support for S3 buckets. This feature allows users to generate a PULP_MANIFEST directly from content in an S3 bucket. It's exciting to note that this valuable addition was a community contribution from ozanunsal. This post is about the pulp-manifest tool. Sync and Publish workflows for File repositories are documented separately.

  • 11 min read

Bridging Worlds: Interacting with LLMs in an MCP Server for Pulp (and the Realities of Local Hardware)

Alright team, and everyone in our awesome Pulp community!

Gather 'round, because I've got a cool project to tell you about – something I've been tinkering with that brings our beloved Pulp API into the wild west of LLMs. Imagine being able to chat with an AI, asking it to list your repos, upload content, or maybe even publish a new version, all by just typing out what you want. That's been the dream I've been chasing!

I've been building a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that lets a user interact with an LLM (Large Language Model) directly, and here's the kicker: this MCP server was specifically designed to talk to the Pulp API! How cool is that?

  • 4 min read

My Experience with sourcery-ai in Pulp-Service Development

As a developer contributing to the pulp-service GitHub repository, I can confidently say that integrating the sourcery-ai bot has significantly reshaped my workflow and, by extension, our team's productivity. The bot has become an integral part of our pull request process, offering automated, structured, and actionable feedback that helps us deliver higher quality code more efficiently.

Here's how sourcery-ai has impacted my productivity:

  • 2 min read

Using Pulp at Microsoft: Coming Full Circle

Hi, I’m David. If you've been using Pulp for long enough, there's a good chance you may have encountered a bug I contributed. I worked on Pulp for many years while at Red Hat, from the beginning of the Pulp 3 back when it was just a proof of concept. Those early days were full of whiteboarding and discussions around which technologies to use (e.g. futures or asyncio?), whether to create a CLI or Web UI, and how to integrate Pulp 3 with products like Satellite and Ansible Galaxy.

Fast-forward to today, I now work at Microsoft on the Azure Core Linux team. And in a really interesting bit of serendipity, we've spent the past few years using Pulp to overhaul packages.microsoft.com, Microsoft's service for Linux package repositories. I've gone from developing Pulp full-time to running it as a user.

  • 3 min read

Writing Docs with AI - An Experiment in Workflow

Writing documentation can often be a significant effort. Recently, I needed to document a new feature, the "Alternate Content Source". But where to start? The core information existed in a user conversation on Matrix. How could I turn that scattered information into structured, usable documentation efficiently? I decided to experiment with an AI tool, specifically NotebookLM, to see if it could streamline the process.

The starting point was straightforward. I took the raw Matrix conversation and uploaded it as a source into NotebookLM. I also added the existing pulpproject.org website as another source, hoping it would provide context and stylistic examples (Note: this specific detail about adding the pulpproject.org site comes from my process description, not the provided source text). My initial prompt was simple: "write me markdown docs from this user conversation". It produced the content for this pull requested.

  • 4 min read

Checkpoint Support - A Journey Towards Predictable and Consistent Deployments

In the ever-evolving landscape of software development, ensuring predictability and consistency in deployments has always been a challenge. Our team faced similar hurdles, especially when managing historical versions of repositories. We needed a solution that could help us recreate environments from specific points in time, ensure reproducible deployments, and track changes in package behavior over time.

Inspired by the success stories of Ubuntu Snapshots on Azure and the increased security and resiliency of Canonical workloads on Azure, we embarked on a journey to develop a feature that could address these challenges.

  • 6 min read

Whenever, Whatever-based Release Cycle

"Release fast, release often!" is not a metaphor, it is a mantra.

Pulp used to be a service mainly running on-premises as part of products with extremely long release cycles. About two years ago, we heard rumors to add highly volatile cloud service style installations to the mix. Because releasing a new version of pulpcore or any of its many plugins was a herculean task, the rumors were accompanied by very concerning sentences like: "We will run this service off of main branches of all the plugins." If that does not make you shiver, you can just stop reading here and go on with your happy life.

  • 1 min read

Pulp UI Beta out now in Pulp images

Pulp-UI (beta) is now available in the latest pulp/pulp image. This was a huge effort over the last two months to get the beta into the hands of our users. Big thanks to Martin Hradil, Zita Nemeckova and everyone who helped us get here. Check out the demo below: