If you haven't already heard we've been diligently working on Lando 4 which has been HARD and will take a while, but it will be worth it.

In the meantime, we are trying to backport cool new Lando 4 features into Lando 3 when it makes sense and with the Lando 3.14.0 prerelease it made sense for the first time. 😃

That said, this pre-release is maybe more prereleasy than previous pre-releases, so definitely only try it out if you are feeling BOLD.

1. New URL Scanner

Apps have gotten more complex since we first made Lando, and as a consequence service start up times can now vary significantly across an application.

For that reason we've replaced the blocking Scanning to determine which services are ready... Please stand by... message with real time scan updates which you can see in the image below.

New Lando 4 URL scanning but in Lando 3!

Additionally, and also to reflect the increasing complexity of web apps, the scanner is much more configurable now:

services:
  myservice:
    type: apache
    scanner:
      path: /ping
      timeout: 1000
      retry: 10
      okCodes:
        - 404
        - 444

You can read more about all of this in the scanner docs. Try it out and if you have any issues report them here.

2. Pantheon SOLR8

We've added support for solr8 in our pantheon recipe which you can set in your pantheon.yml.

pantheon.yml

search:
  version: 8

Then a lando rebuild to get the new stuff. Note that this is a first pass on the service and may not work 100% as expected. If you run into an issue please report it here.

Also be sure to check out the Pantheon docs for setting up SOLR on Drupal and WordPress

3. Other notable things

• Added support for more node versions (lando/node)
• Added support for php:8.1 in pantheon recipes (lando/pantheon#132)
• Fixed issue when mounting mysql:8 config (lando/lando#1462)
• Fixed bug where uninstalled pantheon sites were not redirecting to install.php (lando/pantheon#139)

4. What's next for Lando 3

Health check plugin?

Like the new URL scanner we want to remove the blocking Waiting until X service is ready... health check in favor of realtime updates on said health checks.

Lando update command?

As you may know, we spent a good part of 2022 breaking Lando up into smaller pieces so it would work more like a pluggable ecosystem than a monorepo. While that effort has been completed our deployment and update pipeline is basically still the same; to update Lando you need to download and run a single large installer to get all the new stuff.

A lando update command would allow Lando to update the cli, core, and all its plugins as new versions of each become available.

In this scenario you likely run the Lando installed once and then stay up to date continuously with lando update.

Runtime 4 preview?

We will likely ship an alpha version of the Lando 4 runtime in the coming months that you can access via the current Lando 3 CLI.

The ideal we are striving for here is that you should be able to add runtime: 4 to your Landofile and lando destroy && lando start and spin up your app using the new runtime.

This means the Lando 4 runtime should be able to understand your current Lando 3 Landofile although it will likely give you slightly different behavior. Similarly, the runtime should understand current Lando 3 CLI commands but also may give slightly different behavior.

We also are not 100% sure yet what work will be required to update the current set of official and non-core plugins, or what order we will roll them out, but if you are interested in helping with that, we encourage you to join the Lando Community and get in the #contributors channel.