What is Layertrail?

Layertrail is a desktop app for configuration management of physical things: anything organized as a hierarchy whose parts change over time. That includes a test lab’s rooms, racks, devices, and firmware versions; an industrial test site with hundreds of mechanical, electrical, and software components; what’s installed at a plant or a customer’s site; or the galleries, cases, and objects of a museum exhibit.

It does three things together:

1. Edits a structured project. You build a tree of nodes. Each node has a name and properties, such as a serial number or a firmware version.
2. Saves named snapshots. At a meaningful moment, such as before an upgrade or after a test, you save the whole project as a snapshot with a name and an optional description.
3. Compares any two states. Layertrail tells you what was added, removed, moved, renamed, reordered, or edited between two snapshots, or between a snapshot and your current work.

The problem it solves

Layertrail was originally created to manage a software development lab spread across several rooms, with racks of hardware each running its own stack of software. Picture that lab changing hardware and software, running a test, and a week later having to answer: what did we change, and what did it look like before it broke? The same question comes up wherever physical configurations change: at a test site, after a plant outage, before shipping an update to a customer.

A spreadsheet flattens the hierarchy and has no memory of last week. Git remembers everything, but it describes changes as lines of text in files, and it asks you to think in commits and branches. Layertrail sits between them. It keeps a durable history (Git does the storage behind the scenes) and describes changes in terms of your structure: Switch SW-14 moved from Rack 2 to Rack 4.

Principles

• Your data stays in your folder. A project is a human-readable file, Layertrail.layertrail, in a folder you choose. There is no account and no server, and Layertrail works offline.
• Snapshots are history, not versions you edit. You always edit the current project. Snapshots are fixed records of a moment. Reverting makes the current project match a snapshot and records that it happened; nothing in the timeline is erased.
• Changes are explained, not inferred. Layertrail reports what is different. It does not claim a change caused a test result. That judgment stays with you, and a snapshot description is where you record it.

Status

Layertrail is in alpha. It is usable and tested, but it changes quickly, and a newer version may migrate the project format. Projects made with Manifest, the app’s earlier name, don’t open in Layertrail; see Coming from Manifest. Try it with a copy of your data. See Install Layertrail to get started, or browse the changelog.