The team behind Cloud Foundry, the open source platform-as-a-service developed by VMware, added new application deployment feature called “manifests” to the Cloud Foundry command line tool (VMC). Manifests are YAML documents that contain a list of input commands.

“With this manifest document, VMC will simply read the input values from the file rather than prompt you for each configuration,” the Cloud Foundry blog announcing the feature says. “Not only can you automate vmc push with manifests, you can also bypass interactive inputs for a large portion of VMC’s commands to make using the command-line tool more efficient and user-friendly.” You can learn much more about the feature in that blog post, but here are the basic commands that can benefit from the feature:

• vmc push: Now allows you to specify multiple services. Pushes with information from the manifest. If no manifest is found, it will ask if you want to create one after the interaction is finished.
• vmc stats, vmc update, vmc start, vmc stop: If no application name is given, it operates on the application(s) described by the manifest.
• vmc update: Syncs changes from the root of the application if a manifest is present.
• vmc start: Starts the applications in a multi-app deployment in the proper order (taking dependencies into account).
• vmc stop: Stops multi-app deployments by shutting down each app in the reverse of the order in which they were started.
• vmc restart: See vmc stop and vmc start.
• vmc delete: Delete the application

As interest in DevOps increases, deployment tools are being a hot topic. Just last week Rackspace open sourced its deployment tool Dreadnot. Dell released its Chef based OpenStack deployment tool Crowbar in July, and has since open sourced a plugin for automatically deploying Hadoop. And VMware has released a Crowbar plugin for Cloud Foundry last August.