Inedo’s Hedgehog will no longer be updated, but its best features are part of BuildMaster 6.2.

We love BuildMaster, and we know you do too. But I always felt there were some legacy features in BuildMaster that I wished I’d never put there in the first place. So, over a year ago, we created Hedgehog, our vision of how to deploy software as packages.

We created Hedgehog as a fork off BuildMaster 5.8. We stripped BuildMaster down to create Hedgehog, and we added some important features. Hedgehog had raft support and included a superior pipeline engine. A lot of our users and customers were excited about what Hedgehog could do.

But many of these same users felt it was too high-risk to transition from BuildMaster to Hedgehog. It also seemed that our deployment of Hedgehog was premature: We came to realize that Hedgehog was great at package deployment but didn’t have containers as a first-class concept. We ultimately decided that, while a good experiment, Hedgehog wouldn’t be a valuable part of our project suite (ProGet, BuildMaster, and Otter).

Here’s what you need to know:

• Inedo will no longer update or sell Hedgehog
• Hedgehog will no longer be installable from the Inedo Hub
• Hedgehog’s best features will be part of BuildMaster 6.2

BuildMaster 6.2 basically took Hedgehog’s raft support and pipeline engine to support advanced CI/CD workflows and make what can be a very messy process a lot less messy. Hedgehog’s pipeline engine turns everything in the post-deployment steps into one, giant execution using OtterScript, adding a whole bunch more flexibility over the input for each of these target scripts and to target variables. It also adds pre-deployment steps as well.

Rafts can be developed both inside and outside BuildMaster. Rafts are like a virtual file system, letting you store your scripts wherever you want, like in Git, not just in BuildMaster. Because they’re easy to export, you have more portability and flexibility with your configuration and scripts.

We’ve been shipping “6.2 preview features,” such as Application Templates inside of 6.1, and have just started shipping public releases of BuildMaster 6.2. Check out the upgrade notes to learn more about how to upgrade it.

We hope that the improved pipeline and the raft support of BuildMaster 6.2 will make you forget Hedgehog’s gone. As always, don’t hesitate to contact me directly at apapadimoulis@inedo.com.