Composer v0.19.0

Welcome to Hyperledger Composer v0.19.0

This release contains both awesome new features 💯 and breaking changes 💥 Please read these notes carefully to see what new delights await, and where the breaking changes will impact you.

Note that we love this release so much, we've made it the default release for building your blockchain business networks. That's right - when you pull Composer - you now get v0.19.0 instead of v0.16.x. Pay attention to the breaking changes section below, incase you want to stick to v0.16.x.

This is our first release that we truly believe to be production ready; given time and TSC approval, we hope to brand it v1.0, but for now here you go. We really want you to pick it up, test it, and find as many bugs as you can!

This is the release to build projects on top of Hyperledger Fabric v1.1.x; if you are looking to build on top of the Fabric v1.0.x, you will need to use the v0.16.x development stream.

Documentation for v0.19.x can be found here

Documentation for v0.16.x can be found here

Features

This release comes with some pretty neat features, including:

✨ #3654 This PR is rather substantial and contains the changes to the business network deployment mechanism. Within this PR you get the following:

🆕 Automatic Couch DB index generation for queries. We now automatically index Couch DB for any queries present within your business network definition during the deployment phase. This means that there is no requirement to manually perform the indexing in order to increase query performance. Please note that we only create indexes for queries contained within your query files.

🆕 A whole new business network lifecycle. This is described more within the breaking changes section.

🆕 The ability to specify the npm repository from which external package dependencies will be obtained so that you can control the exact versions of dependencies used. If you are interested in this, please see the documentation. You will appreciate this if that level of control is necessary for your production environment, or because access to external repositories is blocked by firewalls.

✨ #3666 delivers the ability to automatically generate documentation for your business network. We use this to generate documentation for our internal model files ... now you can use it to generate documentation for your business networks 👍

Breaking Changes

👀 Please read this section carefully 👀

This release includes a fundamental change in the way that business networks are deployed. Business networks are now deployed within Hyperledger Fabric 'as chaincode' meaning that the business network (rather than Composer runtime) can be agreed by all parties and signed, using a similar management model to non-Composer chaincode. As a result of this, the deployment and update process has changed.

Changes to business network deployment

The administration commands for business networks have changed to reflect the new lifecycle. We have updated the respective documentation within the tutorials and cli-reference, however for immediate reference please note that:

Commands to deploy a business network have changed and are now:

composer network install
composer network start

The commands to upgrade (update) a business network have changed and are now:

composer network install
composer network upgrade

The following commands are no longer valid:

• composer runtime install
• composer network deploy
• composer network update
• composer network undeploy

All composer card commands have been standardised to use a -c or --card flag, instead of a -n or --name flag. This impacts:

• composer card import
• composer card export
• composer card list
• composer card delete

Notes

⚠️ If using the Composer tooling to create a Hyperledger Fabric development server, this will now be creating a v1.1.0 server by default. If you are using Composer v0.16.x, you will need to use Fabric v1.0.x, and you must set the environment variable export FABRIC_VERSION=hlfv1 when using the Hyperledger Fabric development servers provided by Composer.

⚠️ If you have not specified a version in your npm or docker commands when pulling Composer binaries, and you need to keep using Composer v0.16.x, then you must start specifying the version number - because we have switched the latest tag to Composer v0.19.x:

• npm install -g composer-cli@0.16.6
• docker pull hyperledger/composer-cli:0.16.6

We strongly suggest that you migrate to Composer v0.19.x instead, but we understand that existing projects may need to stick with Composer v0.16.x for the time being.

⚠️ Business Network Cards are not transferable between v0.16.x and v0.17.x onwards. It will be necessary to manually clear your card store in order to use a different version. Please note that the CLI command to delete a named card will not work correctly if targeting a named card that was created from a different version.

⚠️ The Composer Tools is now setting up a Fabric v1.1 network. Unfortunately only Composer v0.18.2 and above are (and will be) compatible with this alpha driver. There are multiple support splits across differing Fabric levels, so please be careful with what versions are being used:

• v0.18.2, v0.19.0 and above are compatible with the Fabric 1.1.0 driver only
• v0.18.0 -> v0.18.1 are compatible with the Fabric RC1 driver only
• v0.17.3 -> v0.17.6 are compatible with Fabric alpha driver only
• v0.17.0 -> v0.17.2 are compatible with Fabric preview driver only

⚠️ The is a change in the business network lifecycle administration, and business network card commands between v0.18.2 and v0.19.0

Conga Comics

Congratulations to making it to the bottom of the release notes! As a reward, out resident artist @EdMoffatt, who appears to get tagged a fair amount in these release notes, has a fresh CongaComic for your enjoyment 👍

Missed out on a Conga Comic, or want to catch up with them all? Fear not, you can view the complete Conga Comic collection at conga-comics