A few months back, a customer demoed their product at a hackathon without hiccups. They were ecstatic about the launch and didn't want to push changes to Jamsocket during this critical time. But the demo had inspired many new ideas and they were eager to resume development.

From working with this customer, we saw opportunities to help developers feel more confident when making changes to their session backend code.

Products like Netlify and Vercel are well-known for their seamless deployment workflows. In particular, their ability to link deployments with specific git commits makes it easy for developers to track deployments and roll back changes if necessary.

Because Jamsocket runs your code with Docker images, we display metadata about your Docker image in the dashboard. But for those less familiar with Docker, that metadata did not easily communicate which version of your code was running on Jamsocket.

So when we proposed linking git commit metadata with images, our customers immediately lit up.

Linking Jamsocket images with git commits

With this launch, we are introducing three new features that link Jamsocket images with git commits.

Using our new Jamsocket Deploy GitHub Action or the include-git-commit flag in our CLI, you can easily send git commit metadata along with new images that you push to Jamsocket.

We also redesigned the service page in our dashboard to better showcase your active images and their associated metadata.

Jamsocket Deploy Github Action

Using our new Github Action, you can automate pushing to Jamsocket using specific triggers like “merging to main.”

When code is pushed to Jamsocket via the GitHub Action, the action provides Jamsocket with relevant metadata, including your Git commit hash, commit message, and branch name.

Include Git Commit CLI Flag

For users who want GitHub metadata displayed in the Jamsocket dashboard but prefer not to rely on GitHub action triggers, we've also introduced a new flag for the push command in our CLI to optionally include Git commit metadata.

Redesigning Service Pages

To integrate this new git commit metadata into our dashboard, we've redesigned our service pages to prominently feature active images along with their git commit and image metadata.

Your image or backend history can be easily accessible in new subpages: backend history and past images.

Already, we've seen how having this crucial metadata makes it easier to identify different versions of code running on Jamsocket.

We're thrilled to offer users a way to link their Jamsocket deployments with git commits. With these updates, developers can ship new features to their session backends quickly and confidently.