March to a stable Lando 3.0.0

Mike PirogMike Pirog|Fri, Feb 7, 2020

In our last project updateopen in new window we told you we were busy working on two major milestones:

  1. Building a sustainable foundation for future Lando growth
  2. Releasing the official stable Lando 3.0.0

Here is where we are at with both of these.

Sustainability

As you likely know, about mid last year we broke through the 10,000 active monthly user threshold and while this was an incredible achievement for the project it also simultaneously laid bare some of its shortcomings. Chief among those:

How does an open source project built by a small team of volunteers provide the consistent bug fixes, updates, features and support that a local development solution demands especially when operating at scale?

Over the last six months we've been trying to answer that question and very soon we finally will be launching our first attempt at an answer: The Lando Alliance.

While I will let our forthcoming announcementopen in new window about The Alliance provide the details the tl;dr is if you give a shit, like we do, about making developers' live's easier, then participate in The Alliance. The main idea here is to build a platform where developers helping developers also helps fund our work on Lando, the support of its users and the future free and open source dev tools they want.

A few examples of how this will work are:

  • Contributing content to this very tech blogopen in new window, thereby contributing to ad revenue, general awareness of Lando and newsletter signups
  • Leading Lando or Lando related eventsopen in new window, thereby building the community and spreading the good word
  • Directly sponsoring the project with your hard earned money so we can cover infrastructure costs, compensate our contributors and provide as much support to our users as we can.

It has yet to be seen whether the above will sufficiently solve the sustainability problem but we very much would like to keep Lando by, for and accountable to developers so we hope you choose to join our movement!

Lando 3.0.0

We've been prioritizing the sustainability problem since solving that provides a strong foundation for future Lando work. That said and unsurprisingly we have not made considerable progress on this front. Nonetheless we are still able to announce a release date for the official, long coming, Lando stable: May the Fourth, 2020.

That release will include the big features we listed in our last update:

But will now also include:

  • Docker Desktop 2.1+ support
  • A refresh of our Pantheon integration
  • Version updates to all our services
  • Other various bug fixes as time allows
  • Merging of any appropriate community PRs we have not been able to get to yet
  • Surprise beta versions for integrations with yet to be named hosting providers

Depending on the success of the Lando Alliance we also would love to dedicate a member of our team to be available full time in Slackopen in new window to help answer any development questions, help update documentation, provide more guides and tutorials, etc.

Finally, part of the Lando Alliance will be a contributors program so that we can better coordinate our awesome contributors around project priorities and engage with them more consistently. We will likely roll this out as the last part of The Alliance and around the stable release launch. That said definitely make sure you sign up beforehand!

Conclusion

It's all happening!