What’s New

The full Release Notes for ActionHero v18 can be found on GitHub, and as usual, we’ve published our Upgrade Guide from the previous version.

The new features I’m most proud of are:

Full Support for async/await programming in ActionHero.

Really. This is a big deal. Our test suite saved hundreds of lines of code. There is no more ‘callback hell’, and in general, everything is so much easier to understand. We don’t need any more flow control tools.

We’ve also significantly increased our test coverage to include plugins and the CLI commands… parts of ActionHero which, in the old callback style, were *very* hard to test.

Full documentation of all public classes and APIs.

I had not heard of JSdoc before this upgrade… But, just like when I learned about standard.js, I now can’t imagine creating publicly-consumable projects without it. JSdoc allows you to comment your code (automatically in many cases) such that you can generate human-readable documentation from your source files. This means that as you write a new method or class, you can use the handy plugin for your code editor to automagically generate documentation.

We’ve set up ActionHero to automatically build our new documentation site, docs.actionherojs.com at the conclusion of every successful test run. This ensures that our documentation will aways be up-to-date now!

A bonus feature of this work is that now you will always have the ability to generate the documentation for your local version of ActionHero. cd ./node_modules/actionhero && npm run docs . In the coming weeks, we’ll add support for multiple versions of ActionHero the documentation website, but having an offline version will ensure that you can get work done with ActionHero.

Requiring the api object.