Transcript: wash 1.0 Beta, Component Model Plugins & wasmCloud 1.9
wasmCloud Weekly Community Call — Wed, Aug 20, 2025 · 14 minutes
Speakers: Brooks Townsend, Jeremy Fleitz, Taylor Thomas
Transcript
Brooks Townsend 03:52
I'll go ahead and start the thing. Hey everybody, welcome to wasmCloud Wednesday for Wednesday, August the 20th. Apologies — I've got a bit of a cough, so I'll mute myself a little bit. But we've got a pretty quick agenda for today. I think we just wanted to talk through some of the latest releases and the latest blog that was published just a couple days ago by Eric. I know we had an agenda item to talk through one of the bigger issues from the wasmCloud roadmap with Aditya, one of the wasmCloud maintainers, but I don't see him in here, so I may just follow up with him offline. Maybe we'll talk about it next week. If you're watching this and interested, we can do a little pair-programming session, or if you just want to listen in on the thoughts, I can spitball the discussion next week.
So over here on the wasmCloud site, if you go to the blog, there's a new post — and I guess I was right, it was about five days ago. Eric actually put this together following from the wasmCloud Q3 2025 roadmap, where we talked about how this "good first issue" column is awesome and we really want issues labeled here on the roadmap so people know where they can jump in and contribute. Eric did an awesome job of essentially taking this list of good first issues from a bunch of our different repos — and the new wash repository with all the updated functionality — and bringing it all together in this blog post. I won't go through it issue by issue, but if folks are interested in taking some of these good first issues from the roadmap, this is a great place to look. We still have over a month, so that's plenty of time to go get your thing done.
A big area of opportunity for contributions right now is in the wash project. It is a fairly green-field evolution of the Wasm Shell, and it's fully working with components as plugins — components being a part of the lifecycle of the CLI, which is really exciting. There are a lot of opportunities to contribute. As we were working on the initial prototype, we obviously weren't going to do literally every single thing, so I left comments around the code all over the place pointing to good places to try and contribute. So if there are any issues in this repository with the good-first-issue tag that speak to you, this is a great one. The CLI is written in Rust, but we actually have plugins in this repo in Rust and in Go. So even if you're not native to Rust, there are plenty of places to plug in. Ha — plug in.
Just recently, we've been cutting releases of wash under a 1.0 beta tag. For now, we're essentially keeping the old version of wash pinned to the less-than-1.0 major version, and we'll eventually be able to supplant it with this once we've identified that it covers the key workflows — that the plugin model is sufficient to implement many different types of commands, including ones that aren't included in the base CLI.
I just want to give a huge shout-out to Carlos, one of the contributors in this repository who came in and immediately started taking some of these good first issues. It was really awesome to see — I think it was actually just a day after I filed all the issues in the repository. I'm really happy to see folks getting their hands dirty here in the wash code. So please, if folks are interested in taking the issues, there's no real formal process for getting it assigned to you. But if you just want to leave a comment on the issue saying "hey, I'll do this, this looks fun," that's plenty — just to make sure we don't put in duplicate PRs or anything like that.
If you're interested in testing out wash in your GitHub Action — if you're running some wasmCloud pipelines — Bailey has been working really hard on the setup-wash action, and actually going through the entire process to push this into the GitHub Actions marketplace, which is really awesome. So you can search for "setup-wash action." It seems to follow as many best practices for a reusable action as possible, and it actually points directly to the latest 1.0 beta version of wash. It's really simple, works on the different runners that GitHub provides. This is something I feel like we've had an opportunity to use more of in the wasmCloud org, so we plan on leaning a little bit more into this for things like setting up wash, using wash to build a component, and using wash to push a component in the standard way to a container registry — all those things. So if folks are using this, do you have any feedback? Here it is — the setup-wash action. We're going to be publishing more and more here as we find opportunities to do so.
I think that's really all I had on the shortlist of the agenda — just talking about the newest things we've been working on. Work on wash and on wasmCloud has been going really well. wasmCloud itself just got a new minor release last week, I believe, for version 1.9. I'll go back and share that, just to give folks a shout-out. We had a lot of good work go into this one, including Jacob's work to get wash working with the XDG base-directory specification. This was awesome — it's a standard way of organizing local files on the machine, and it really helps because now we don't have this bespoke dot-wash directory that clutters up the user's home directory.
We're also adding a dashboard option for wash dev, to ensure that when you run wash dev, the dashboard essentially launches from there. And it looks like me, but it's not me — it's OSS Fellow Massoud, who put in the HTTP client built-in provider, which I've heard from folks has been working well. You just use the built-in and skip a little network hop to go make your outgoing HTTP request. So that's been really cool to see. And a shout-out to all of our folks who made their first contribution in this release — I shouted everybody out here in the wasmCloud Slack. Awesome stuff. It's really cool to see more and more contributors come in every release.
So other than that, I really think that's it. Do folks have any other agenda items, things they wanted to discuss in wasmCloud, or from the broader WebAssembly ecosystem today?
Brooks Townsend 12:49
Alrighty — quick wasmCloud Wednesday, then. We'll take it. 45 minutes back. Everybody go do your wasmCloud Wednesday meditation, or whatever. Liam, did you come on to say hi?
Taylor Thomas 13:03
Thank you, no — just to say goodbye. It's okay, I'm still dying over here from Brooks's comment. Just give me a second to recover. All right, I feel like we need to make the wasmCloud version of that — like affirmations for SREs. Like a video.
Brooks Townsend 13:18
Your components have scaled to zero.
Taylor Thomas 13:23
Go has normal language support.
Brooks Townsend 13:27
It's easy for you to fetch that WIT. So good. All right — join us next time for the wasmCloud SRE affirmations and such. All right, this is getting off the rails. Thanks, everybody. Have a great rest of your week, and I'll see you next week for wasmCloud Wednesday.