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Happy 2023, Another year of TrueCharts

Kjeld Schouten
Kjeld Schouten
Maintainer & Founder of TrueCharts

Happy 2023 everyone! We hope you had a great holiday season and are ready for a productive and successful 2023. As we start the new year, we wanted to announce that we have dropped support for TrueNAS SCALE 22.02 “Angelfish” completely and will only support TrueNAS SCALE 22.12 “BlueFin” moving forward.

Looking back at the past year, we are thrilled to see the tremendous growth of the TrueCharts project. In 2022, our Discord community grew from barely 1000 members to over 5200, and our project donations increased from just 50 euros a month to more than 250 euros a month. We also saw a significant increase in Github stars and the number of apps we offer.

As we look ahead to 2023, we have big plans for the TrueCharts project. Our goal is to reach 10,000 Discord members and offer 1000 apps by the end of the year. We also hope to increase our project donations to 500 euros per month and use these funds more proactively by offering bounties for much-wanted work on the project. Additionally, we will be putting more time and effort into (video) documentation and have almost completed a full refactor of our Common Chart.

Overall, we are excited for the opportunities and potential that 2023 holds for the TrueCharts project. Thank you for your continued support and we can’t wait to see what the new year brings.

TrueTool, Refreshed

Kjeld Schouten
Kjeld Schouten
Maintainer & Founder of TrueCharts

We are excited to announce that we have completely reworked our “TrueTool” tool to improve its functionality and reliability.

For those unfamiliar with TrueTool, it is a tool that helps users with bulk-updating of Apps and provides easy access to “hidden” features of TrueNAS SCALE, such as enabling “apt” and “helm” commands.

With the latest update, TrueTool now contains multiple hot-patches that fix migration and backup issues on TrueNAS SCALE 22.12 “bluefin”. It also includes improvements for slower systems with lots of Apps, as well as the removal of colors that were not looking nice in email output.

Many of these changes were made possible thanks to the HeavyScript project, which was started by former staff member “HeavyBullets” in 2022. The HeavyScript project has made numerous improvements to the original (then python-based) TrueTool code, and we have made sure to port as many of these changes back to TrueTool to ensure that all of our users can benefit from them.

Thanks to all these changes, TrueTool is now more reliable than ever and will continue to provide solid updates and backups for our users. We hope that you will find TrueTool to be an invaluable tool for managing your TrueNAS SCALE system as well.

Website and Announcement Changes

Kjeld Schouten
Kjeld Schouten
Maintainer & Founder of TrueCharts

Hello TrueCharts community!

We wanted to share some updates with you regarding some changes we’re making to how we communicate and present information on our website.

First and foremost, we have decided to move away from using short tweets for announcements and instead focus on more “complete” longer news posts on our website. We understand that tweets can be easy to miss and often do not provide enough context or information. By posting longer news updates on our website, we hope to provide a more comprehensive and clear understanding of what’s going on with the TrueCharts project.

In addition to this, we have listened to your feedback and have decided to disable interstitial advertisements on our website. We understand that these can be disruptive and we want to prioritize a positive user experience for our community.

Finally, we wanted to let you know that we are hard at work on improving the documentation for our App on the website. This includes creating new index pages and bringing back security-scan pages to provide more in-depth information and resources for our users.

We hope these changes will improve the overall experience for our community and we appreciate your support and feedback. Thank you for being a part of the TrueCharts project!

TrueNAS SCALE 22.12: hostPath Validation

Kjeld Schouten
Kjeld Schouten
Maintainer & Founder of TrueCharts

We are excited to finally be able to work with TrueNAS SCALE version 22.12 “BlueFin,” however this version includes a new feature called “hostPath validation.” This feature is designed to ensure the stability and security of TrueNAS SCALE systems by preventing the use of any datasets for apps where that dataset is also used for shares.

This safety check makes sure apps and sharing services (SMB, NFS, etc) do not use the same data. This is done to avoid permissions issues, as there are a lot of apps that change permissions without giving the user a warning, or just plain do not work with ACL’s.

While this feature is an important security measure, it can also be a source of frustration for some users who may be using datasets for both apps and shares. If you are encountering issues with “hostPath validation”, such as Apps being “stuck on deploying” after update, there are three potential solutions you can consider:

  1. Disable “hostPath validation.” If you disable “hostPath validation,” TrueCharts will not provide support on things that involve storage. If you disable “hostPath validation” and have an issue with the app, your configuration screenshots must not have any hostPath storage defined.

  2. Keeping “hostPath validation” enabled and disable shares on any datasets that are also used with apps. TrueCharts will continue to provide support for things that involve storage.

  3. Keeping “hostPath validation” enabled and keep shares enabled on any datasets that are also used with apps. Instead of hostPath, you can mount the dataset using the [NFS option on all TrueCharts apps](/.

The Option to disable “hostPath validation” can be found in Apps -> Settings -> Advanced Settings -> Enable Host Path Safety Checks

We hope these suggestions are helpful in resolving any issues you may be experiencing with “hostPath validation” on TrueNAS SCALE version 22.12 “BlueFin”.

Even faster Release Processing

Kjeld Schouten
Kjeld Schouten
Maintainer & Founder of TrueCharts

We are excited to announce that we have recently made significant improvements to our continuous integration (CI) process, reducing the time it takes to process all of our apps from 12 hours to less than 20 minutes. This has been a major focus for us, as we understand the importance of fast feedback and iteration for our developers and users.

One of the key challenges we faced in improving the speed of our CI process was the use of Helm dependency update and Chart Releaser. These tools where essential for managing and releasing our chart packages, but they have no caching and can sometimes break the release pipeline when pushing back into the repository. To address these issue, we developed custom tooling replacing these generalized tools.

Our custom logic works by first checking the repository for any existing chart packages that have been updated since the last release. If any updates are found, we use a combination of caching and selective release processes to ensure that only the necessary chart packages are released and their dependencies updated, rather than releasing all packages every time. The caching and increased efficiency of the new tooling, helps to reduce the overall time required for the CI process and ensures that our release pipeline remains fast-and-stable.

We are confident that these improvements will significantly benefit our developers and users, and we look forward to continuing to optimize and streamline our CI process in the future.