Friendica 2018.09 released
Dear everybody in the Federation, the Fediverse and anywhere else, the Friendica team is pleased to announce the release of Friendica The Tazmans Flax-lily 2018.09.
This release brings the long awaited restructuring of the item table in the database, alongside some 100 closed issues from the tracker. Please see the CHANGELOG file for the complete overview of the changes. Here just a short list of the noteworthy changes since the 2018.05 release of Friendica.
- The long awaited restructuring of the item table of the database will finally be included in this release. The needed changes and alterations of the database structure and content will take some time. Depending on the resources available on your system this can take hours or even days. The maintenance mode will inform you about the progress.
- The configuration structure is changed. Your old `.htconfig.php` file will still work, but you will get a notification in the admin panel with some hopefully explaining text on how to convert your settings to the config file. In some cases the encoding of the displayed text got mangled up, if you are suffering from such garbage you need to switch to the new config style and set the correct encoding for the database.
- The `.htaccess` file is no part of the git repository anymore. Instead we now ship the `.htaccess-dist` file that you have to copy to the `.htaccess` location. This has the advantage that you can now customise the `.htaccess` file to meet your requirements. Please make a copy of your old `.htaccess` file should you have made any changes and restore the file after the update from the backup or the distributed file. Without a working `.htaccess` file your node will probably not work!
- We removed the old syntax highlighting mechanism from `[code]` blocks due to problems federating the highlighted syntax to other platforms. There will be an addon for this in the next release.
- The libravatar service will be continued, so contrary to the note with the last release, you can keep using the libravatar addon to automatically generate avatar pictures for your users.
Thanks everyone who has made this release possible. Your work is much appreciated!
How to Update
Updating from old Friendica versions
If you are updating from a version older then Friendica 3.5.4 you have to make the update process in two steps due to a change in the updating procedure. First update to the 3.5.4 release and then update to the current release.
Please further note, that since Friendica 3.6 we use composer for dependency management. If you are updating via git, you have to remember to update the dependencies as well.
Pre-Update Procedures
Ensure that the last backup of your Friendica installation was done recently. While testing, we did not encounter problems (except those listed below), but better save than sorry.
This is especially true during this update for your `.htaccess` file which we removed from the repository so you can make local adjustments to the files without further conflicts. Please make a copy of the file before you start the update and restore it afterwards. If you have not made any changes to the file, you can use the new `.htaccess-dist` file and copy that to the `.htaccess` file.
Using the Archive files
If you had downloaded the source files in an archive file (zip or tar.gz) please download the current version of the archive from GitHub (friendica-full-2018.09.tar.gz and friendica-addons-2018.09.tar.gz and unpack it on your local computer.
As many files got deleted or moved around, please upload the unpacked files to a new directory on your server (say friendica_new) and copy over your existing `.htconfig.php` and `.htaccess` files. Afterwards rename your current Friendica directory (e.g. friendica) to friendica_old and friendica_new to friendica.
The files of the dependencies are included in the archive (make sure you are using the friendica-full-2018.09 archive), so you don’t have to worry about them.
Please be aware of the changes in the configuration format. You should follow the instructions linked from your admin panel as soon as possible to move your configuration to the new location.
Using git
Updating from the git repositories should only involve a pull from the Friendica core repository and addons repository. Remember to also update the dependencies with composer.
cd friendica git pull bin/composer.phar install cd addon git pull
If you want to switch the branch (e.g. if you helped testing the RC code) please do so after the pull using `git checkout`.
Be aware that the `.htaccess` file was removed from the git repository. You have to restore yours from a backup (if you have done local changes) or from the `.htaccess-dist` file (copy the file to `.htaccess` if you had not done any changes to the old `.htaccess` file).
Post-Update Procedures
Restore your .htaccess file from the backup or the .htaccess-dist file.
The conversion process of the items stored in the database can take a long time. Reports indicate some hours to days or even weeks depending on the number of stored items and the available resources on the server.
If you can start the process directly from the command line interface, this will speed up the process significantly. To do so run the following command (use screen or a similar tool so you can detach from the session while the process is running):
bin/console postupdate
from the base of your Friendica installation.
The conversation of the stored items to the new structure of the database will cause some load on the server. It will not interfere with the daily usage of your Friendica node. Once it is finished the needed storage for the database should be lowered significantly, especially on large nodes.
Known Problems
Should the DB update process get stuck
If you encounter this, please initiate the DB update manually from the command line by running the script
bin/console dbstructure update
from the base of your Friendica installation. If the output contains any error message, please let us know using the channels mentioned below.
Problem with InnoDB on MySQL 5.7
One user reported problems during the update of the database using MySQL 5.7 getting the error message `Creating index ‘PRIMARY’ required more than ‘innodb_online_alter_log_max_size’ bytes of modification log. Please try again.` from MySQL. If you encounter this problem, please try the following:
- increase the config value mentioned in the error message above,
- execute this command in your mysql console: `update config set v=1278 where k=”post_update_version”;`
- after this execute the command `bin/console postupdate`.
How to Contribute?
If you want to contribute to the project, you don’t need to have coding experience. There are a number of tasks listed in the issue tracker with the label “Junior Jobs” we think are good for new contributors. But you are by no means limited to these – if you find a solution to a problem (even a new one) please make a pull request at github or let us know in the development forum.
Contribution to Friendica is also not limited to coding. Any contribution to the documentation, the translation or advertisement materials is welcome or reporting a problem. You don’t need to deal with git(hub) or Transifex if you don’t like to. Just get in touch with us and we will get the materials to the appropriate places.
Thanks again everyone who helped making this release possible and have fun!
friendi.ca/2018/09/23/friendic…
f.belug.de/profile/cat-alina
!Friendica Support Since yesterday I have several unicode encoding issues on develop branch. Can anybody confirm this?forum.friendi.ca
Friendica 2018.05 releasedDear Federation, the Friendica team is pleased to announce the release of Friendica The Tazmans Flax-lily 2018.05.
Back on track with scheduled releases, after 3.6 took such a long time. In this release we have packed some bug fixes and enhancements. After an incompatibility glitch with the last release, Friendica 2018.05 is now again compatible with PHP 5.6. However we recommend using a more recent PHP version to further enhance the performance gain from the ongoing overhaul of the Friendica code and processes. Obviously GDPR was one thing we concentrated on for this release. Identifying problems in existing features (e.g. account and node mobility), adding new features (see below) and making things more transparent. To make a long story short, here a list of the noteworthy changes since the last release:
- Finnish translation was added to the repository from Transifex. With it, Friendica now has 20 localizations from which 11 have more then 80% of the core plattform translated (DE, EN, EN-GB, EN-US, ES, FI, FR, IT, PL, RU, ZH-CN).
- New module for Terms of Services for your node that can be activated from the admin panel. If the module is activated links from the general information page and the user registration will be added. Additionally a basic privacy statement can be shown in both, the TOS page and the registration page.
- Many utility scripts are now bundled in a console that can be found in the bin directory. Please see bin/console –help for all available commands.
- When entering a new password, the choosen one will be checked locally against a database of exposed passwords.
- As libravatar is closing their service we have added a new alternative to the gravatar service based on David Revoy’s cat-avatar-generator: the catavatar.
- The long deprecated themes frost( and frost-mobile have been removed from the Friendica repository. If you need them, you can find them in the deprecated-themes repository.
For a list of further changes, please have a look at the CHANGELOG file.
wordcloud from the commit messagesThanks to everyone who made this release possible, by writing code, translating the user interface and reporting issues!
How to update?
Pre-Update procedures
Ensure that the last backup of your Friendica database was done recently. While testing, we did not encounter problems, but better save than sorry.From the archive files
If you had downloaded the source files in an archive file (zip or tar.gz) please download the current version of the archive from GitHub (friendica-full-2018.05.tar.gz and friendica-addons-2018.05.tar.gz) and unpack it on your local computer.As many files got deleted or moved around, please upload the unpacked files to a new directory on your server (say friendica_new) and copy over your existing .htconfig.php file. Afterwards rename your current Friendica directory (e.g. friendica) to friendica_old and friendica_new to friendica.
The files of the dependencies are included in the archive (make sure you are using the friendica-full-2018.05 archive), so you don’t have to worry about them.
From git
Regardless of the branch you are on (master, develop or 2018.05-rc) all you have to do to get the new code is to run
git pull
on your server in the base and the addon directory. Remember to update the dependencies via composer as well.If you helped testing the release candidate, you should also switch to either the master or the develop branch. Thanks for testing!
If you are updating from an older version then the 3.6 release, please be aware that Friendica is now using composer to manage the dependencies. After you pulled the latest code, you have to check the dependencies for updates as well. To do so run
bin/composer.phar install
from the base directory of your Friendica installation. To be able to extract the downloaded archives, you need to have the php-zip module installed on your server. If you don’t want to remember this every time you pull, you can also use a so called git-hook to do it automatically. Please have a look at the docs for further information about this.If you are updating from a version older then 3.5.4 you have to make the update process in two steps due to a change in the updating procedure. First update to the 3.5.4 release and then update to the current release.
Post-Update procedures
If you are updating from the 3.6 release (or older versions) of Friendica please remember to change the path to the worker in the cron job to adopt the changed location.It should now be something along these lines:
/usr/bin/php bin/worker.php
Among other things the worker will detect changes to the database structure. The changes will be applied automatically and may, depending on the size of your table (especially the item table) and the available resources on the server, take some time. On larger systems this can be hours.How to Contribute?
If you want to contribute to the project, you don’t need to have coding experience. There are a number of tasks listed in the issue tracker with the label “Junior Jobs” we think are good for new contributors. But you are by no means limited to these – if you find a solution to a problem (even a new one) please make a pull request at github or let us know in the development forum.Contribution to Friendica is also not limited to coding. Any contribution to the documentation, the translation or advertisement materials is welcome or reporting a problem. You don’t need to deal with git(hub) or Transifex if you don’t like to. Just get in touch with us and we will get the materials to the appropriate places.
Thanks everyone who helped making this release possible and have fun!
friendi.ca/2018/06/01/friendic…
Check for exposed password during password change · Issue #4604 · friendica/friendica
Today I stumbled on https://github.com/DivineOmega/password_exposed, a library that exposes a handy function to check if a given password has been part of the leaks recorded by https://haveibeenpwn...GitHub
