Changelog

The first public Velvet release. Everything before this was a prototype that was never published, so this entry describes the product rather than a change to one.

What Velvet does

• Direct IPv4 GET and HEAD checks of every configured endpoint from GitHub-hosted runners, every five minutes, with separate response-time samples four times a day.
• Incidents and planned maintenance recorded as GitHub Issues, opened after confirmed failures and closed after confirmed recoveries.
• Up to 365 days of availability, response-time, incident, and maintenance history on a dedicated branch the monitor owns alone.
• A themeable status page published through GitHub Pages, with four system themes, service icons, analytics, SEO output, and custom domains.

Installing

Browser onboarding at setup.velvet.li is the only supported way in. It creates the repository, writes the validated configuration, enables Pages, starts the first monitoring run, and records which Velvet version the installation runs. Copying the template directly produces a repository with no version lock, which can never receive a managed update.

Updating

Velvet installs new versions for you, from the Configurator, without anyone opening a repository or acting on a pull request. An update replaces only the workflow and Issue-template files Velvet owns, plus its own version lock. velvet.yml, the generated data branch, incidents, maintenance records, repository secrets, Pages and domain settings, README.md, and LICENSE are never part of one.

That promise is proven twice: by the service from GitHub's own view of the change before merging, and by a check running in the installation's repository against the merge GitHub actually built. A failed check leaves the installation untouched, and a failed publication restores and republishes the previous version without rewriting history.

Security releases that need no migration can install themselves. That is on by default and can be turned off in the Configurator. Everything else waits for the owner.

GitHub requirements

Velvet uses the repository-scoped GITHUB_TOKEN for monitoring and publishing. No personal access token is required. A private endpoint may reference one repository secret by environment-variable name, and only that named secret is mapped into the monitor workflow.

Limitations

IPv6 monitoring is deliberately absent until GitHub-hosted runners provide documented native IPv6 connectivity. A configured service is monitored over IPv4 only.

Licensing

Velvet is published under the MIT license. Generated monitoring data keeps its own provenance and licensing status, which LICENSING.md describes.