What's coming in 5.2

[girish]

Wanted to give some progress on the release here. Both @nebulon and I are taking a bit of break for Jitsi We will revisit once we finish some more enjoyable tasks.

• Update base image - this is done! Apps are slowly getting updated one by one.

• Add support for member-only mailing lists - done!
  

• Default to ECC certs from Let's Encrypt - done!
  

• Redis status - Under services, you can now tune redis instance of each app
  

App firewall will not make it this release since the changes are stacking up.

[girish]

Volumes/External mounting - we did a couple of iterations of this and neither of them are satisfactory. The feature itself is quite easy to implement but what we found is that other than Emby and Nextcloud most apps don't support scanning random directories for content.

To go back to why people were trying external storage to start with had to do with Cloudron backups not having flexibility wrt backup policy and persistence. So, we are going to look into fixing that first instead (in this release).

[avatar1024]

@girish Sounds great, well done for the work and really glad to see the mailing list feature!

As for external storage, understandable choice for a first implementation. In a second time though, even if it only work for Nextcloud and Emby, that could still be a decent step forward too.

And for Jitsi, sounds like a right headache. Thanks for having tried hard for a while now. Did you get any support from upstream devs?

[girish]

@avatar1024 We haven't contacted upstream devs. From what we have seen, most people who try to install the non-debian packages are basically stuck with incomplete docs. One has to just reverse engineer from the deb package source code. It's all open source, so it just takes time to decode.

[girish]

Some more updates.

• Clicking the update button now will always give you an update, if it's available. No more required to ask us to whitelist an update.

• Encrypted backups - there were security flaws with the current encryption. It's been fixed (more info when we do the actual release). thanks to @mehdi who has patiently worked with us through this.

• App graphs! Currently, just RAM and Disk. CPU and Network will come later.
  

• System graphs
  

• Backup listing UI for the platform
  

• New backup retention policy (this is same as keep daily/weekly/monthly in borg/restic).
  

• Finally, there is a way import and export the backup configuration easily. You see this in the right of the backups. You get a config file that can then be put in another Cloudron instance for restore or import.

We hope to get this out next week. Just doing a lot testing now.

[d19dotca]

@girish Loving the graphs! Eager to get 5.2.

[d19dotca]

@girish One very minor thought. "Cleanup Backups" seems like a mouth-full. Maybe something like "Purge backups" or similar?

[girish]

@d19dotca Currently, that button actually doesn't remove backups. It just cleans up backup based on the backup policy (i.e it triggers the cleanup-backups cron job instantly). Maybe, I will keep it hidden for the coming release, because I can see it needs some explanation.

[jdaviescoates]

I'd still really like to be able to filter apps in the app store by LDAP support

[jdaviescoates]

Full text search for email really important and much needed too. Would make ditching Gmail a little more bearable given how limited all open source webmail clients are.

[jdaviescoates]

And once we've got Jitsi Meet and BigBlueButton being able to scale a single instance of Cloudron across multiple servers will become ever more important too.

[girish]

We are slowly rolling out 5.2 to a more wider audience week. The exact version as of right now is 5.2.3. Actual release announcement will follow in two days or so.

[Mallewax]

@jdaviescoates Thank you, server-side e-mail full text search is high on my wish list, too. I have already ditched gmail in anticipation of the more great things to come. Cloudron rocks.

[girish]

An update on the rollout, we have found some regressions with 5.2.3:

• If you enable/disable email, it will show an error popup in UI. This is a harmless error and can be ignored.
• If you have a stopped app which uses redis, then backups fail (it's more nuanced, it fails if you stopped it after you updated to 5.2.0/5.2.1/5.2.2)
• App disk graphs are not working.

We will fix the above for 5.2.4.

[necrevistonnezr]

@girish said in What's coming in 5.2:

An update on the rollout, we have found some regressions with 5.2.3:

• If you enable/disable email, it will show an error popup in UI. This is a harmless error and can be ignored.
• If you have a stopped app which uses redis, then backups fail (it's more nuanced, it fails if you stopped it after you updated to 5.2.0/5.2.1/5.2.2)
• App disk graphs are not working.

We will fix the above for 5.2.4.

One small annoyance: If you give app passwords for different the same name, it throws an error that the ID is already in use. Example: I wanted to use the same device name (e.g. iPhone, iPad, PC) for the app password for mail, radicale, nextcloud etc.. After setting up the mail password calling it "iPhone", I couldn't name the app password for radicale "iPhone", too.

[girish]

@necrevistonnezr Good catch. Looks like we got the uniqueness constraint in 5.1 itself wrong. Currently, it is (name, userid). It shoud be (name, appid, userid) or maybe even just (appid, userid). We cannot fix it for this release but maybe the next since we try to do db changes only in new releases.