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Helmdeck v0.10.0 — content packs, 38 packs total, registry-published

· 6 min read
Tosin Akinosho
Tosin Akinosho
Helmdeck maintainer

Tag: v0.10.0. Upgrade in 5 min: git checkout v0.10.0 && make install.

v0.10.0 is a content-packs release. The two new packs let an agent generate something it can publish — a blog post via Ghost, a multi-speaker podcast MP3 via ElevenLabs — in one tool call, instead of needing to chain http.fetch + custom JWT logic + ffmpeg shellouts. Pack count climbs from 36 to 38.

It also closes a gap on the operator side: until this release helmdeck had zero documentation on how to upgrade a running install. New docs/howto/upgrade-helmdeck.md covers the in-place Compose upgrade, schema migrations, post-upgrade validation, and rollback. With Kubernetes coming in v1.0, the absence of this guide had become a real risk.

What's new in v0.10.0​

blog.publish (#103)​

Posts to a Ghost blog (over the Admin API with HS256 JWT auth) or to the helmdeck artifact store as raw markdown/HTML. Two destinations, one pack — chosen via destination: ghost | artifact. The Ghost path takes care of the JWT lifecycle (5-min expiry, kid header) so the agent doesn't have to.

{
  "destination": "ghost",
  "ghost_admin_url": "https://yourblog.com/ghost/api/admin/",
  "credential": "ghost-admin-key",
  "title": "How we shipped v0.10.0",
  "markdown": "# Hello…",
  "tags": ["release-notes"],
  "status": "draft"
}

The agent writes one tool call and gets a published-post URL back. Body mode (you give it the markdown) and prompt mode (you give it a topic + outline and the gateway-routed model writes the body) both ship.

podcast.generate (#106)​

Multi-speaker TTS pipeline: 4-mode dispatcher (script mode, prompt mode, source_url mode via Firecrawl scrape, source_text mode), per-turn ElevenLabs synthesis, ffmpeg-concat with anullsrc silence padding between turns. Outputs an MP3 to the artifact store.

{
  "speakers": {
    "Alex":   "21m00Tcm4TlvDq8ikWAM",
    "Jordan": "EXAVITQu4vr4xnSDxMaL"
  },
  "script": [
    {"speaker": "Alex",   "text": "Welcome back to the show…"},
    {"speaker": "Jordan", "text": "And today we're diving into…"}
  ],
  "theme": "deep-dive",
  "silence_between_turns_ms": 400
}

Live-tested on the way to the tag: 4-turn script → 17.2 s of MP3, 275 KB, ID3v2.4 header, both speakers distinct. The TTS engine selection is pluggable via the Engine interface — ElevenLabs is the default; bring-your-own is straightforward to drop in. (Future post coming on the engineering details.)

vision.click_anywhere — fixed mechanically, still experimental​

#105 closed #102 — the per-step screenshots now genuinely change between turns instead of returning identical bytes from the same failed click. The action history threading + post-dispatch wait both work as designed.

But: the underlying limitation is model-side, not platform-side. Real click-anywhere goals ("focus the URL bar", "click the New Tab button") still rarely converge to done even with the loop fixed — the vision model emits sensible coordinates but doesn't recognize when the click succeeded. We've filed #112 as a research track for this.

For the v0.10.0 release notes we flagged both vision.click_anywhere and vision.fill_form_by_label as experimental for production. If you have a deterministic browser-automation goal, prefer web.test — it goes through Playwright MCP and is materially more reliable. We'd rather lose a vanity feature claim than ship something that doesn't work.

Helmdeck on the official MCP Registry​

v0.10.0 is also the first release to publish to registry.modelcontextprotocol.io — the canonical metadata source for Anthropic, GitHub, PulseMCP, and Microsoft-backed MCP discovery. Helmdeck is now searchable as io.github.tosin2013/helmdeck.

What this changes for you:

  • Registry-aware MCP clients can install helmdeck with one command (claude mcp add @helmdeck/mcp-bridge and similar).
  • Aggregators (mcp.so, Glama, PulseMCP) auto-pull from the official registry, so helmdeck will appear there over the next few days without us doing anything.
  • The .mcp/server.json in the repo is now the single source of truth for install metadata. Both npm (@helmdeck/mcp-bridge@0.10.0) and OCI (ghcr.io/tosin2013/helmdeck-mcp:0.10.0) install paths are declared.

The cross-client install walkthrough lives at Register helmdeck with your MCP client.

Upgrade in 5 minutes​

If you're running a v0.9.0 Compose stack:

cd /path/to/helmdeck
git fetch origin
git checkout v0.10.0
make sidecars
make install

Schema migrations apply automatically on first connection (no manual migrate up). Validate post-upgrade:

curl -fsS http://localhost:3000/healthz
JWT=$(curl -fsS -X POST http://localhost:3000/api/v1/auth/login \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{"username":"admin","password":"…"}' | jq -r .token)
curl -fsS -H "Authorization: Bearer $JWT" http://localhost:3000/api/v1/packs | jq '. | length'  # → 38

Then re-run ./scripts/configure-openclaw.sh so the SKILL.md gets re-stamped with the v0.10.0 commit SHA.

The full upgrade procedure (rollback included) is at Upgrade helmdeck.

Phase 7 audit — Kubernetes is next​

While prepping the release I audited the v1.0 / Kubernetes path and filed four follow-up issues:

  • #108 — schema-migration cross-version test (P1)
  • #109 — sidecar version pinning (P2)
  • #110 — vault master-key rotation (P2)
  • #111 — cross-version upgrade smoke in CI (P2)

None block v0.10.0. All are scheduled into Phase 7 alongside the existing T701-T715 work. v1.0 with Helm chart + Kubernetes deployment remains the headline target.

What slipped, and what's next​

The originally-planned v0.10.0 (Pack Authoring + Test Runner) didn't ship this cycle — the content packs were ready, the authoring tooling wasn't. That work moves to v0.11.0. Marketplace beta moves to v0.12.0.

If you want to track:

Try it​

git clone https://github.com/tosin2013/helmdeck.git
cd helmdeck && git checkout v0.10.0
make install

Or wire it into Claude Code, Claude Desktop, OpenClaw, Gemini CLI, or Hermes Agent via the registry-install guide. Both new packs ship with reference documentation under /reference/packs/blog/publish and /reference/packs/podcast/generate.

If you ship a podcast or a Ghost post via helmdeck this week, drop a link — we're starting to collect "made with helmdeck" examples.

See also​