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Changes to Storage, Persistence, and PostgreSQL

Kjeld Schouten
Kjeld Schouten
Maintainer & Founder of TrueCharts

We’re glad to announce that shortly we will release a big update to all our Apps. This will be a complex update that technically includes a few changes that might break some specific features for some users. While we do not foresee any data loss, it’s imperative to back up your data.

Standardization of PVC Storage

A number of new storage options are being released. These are all optional and should be considered somewhat experimental.

Redesign of Cloudnative-PG

Our Cloudnative-PG backend has been completely rewritten. This should provide more stability, but also carries the risk of introducing new bugs.

Required Migration Steps

If you want to update, here are the instructions:

All Platforms

  • We strongly advise upgrading all charts and not just a select few as the new version of ClusterIssuer might not be fully compatible with charts on old versions.
  • Ingress: In some cases it might be prudent to disable ingress prior to update and enable it again afterwards.
  • Statefulsets: Be sure to remove any statefulsets made by TrueCharts Helm Charts before or after update. See instructions below.

Helm

SCALE

  • Ingress: Most of the cert-manager settings have been moved to “integrations” and they are reset.
  • Ingress: All of the Traefik settings have been moved to “integrations” and they are reset.
  • Ingress: This means you likely will lose TLS and security middlewares after the update, until adapted.
  • CNPG: If present in the old GUI, Instance number and storage size have been moved and reset to defaults.
  • Traefik: After updating, you will need to check a checkbox at the bottom, with a warning confirmation, before you will be able to do any further updates or edits.

Stateful Set Instructions

The charts with statefulsets have a manual step. but it wont require reinstall. make sure to refresh your catalog. We do not have many statefulsets in our catalog, so expect it to be mostly OpenLDAP and/or Redis related.

SCALE

To check which have statefulsets:

Terminal window
k3s kubectl get statefulsets -A | grep "ix-"

Then to delete the statefulset:

Terminal window
k3s kubectl delete statefulset STATEFULSETNAME -n ix-APPNAME

Example:

Terminal window
k3s kubectl delete statefulset blocky-redis -n ix-blocky

Once deleted you can attempt the update (or if you were already updated to latest versions, then edit and save without any changes)

Helm

To check which have statefulsets:

Terminal window
kubectl get statefulsets -A

Then to delete the statefulset:

Terminal window
kubectl delete statefulset STATEFULSETNAME -n APPNAME

Example:

Terminal window
kubectl delete statefulset blocky-redis -n blocky

Once deleted you can attempt the update (or if you were already updated to latest versions, then edit and save without any changes)

🎄 Merry Christmas / Happy Holidays from TrueCharts! 🎄

Steven McElligott
Steven McElligott
Head Moderator

As the holiday season sparkles around us, we at TrueCharts want to extend our warmest wishes for a Merry Christmas to our incredible community. This year has been a remarkable journey, and we couldn’t have done it without you!

🚀 Major Milestone Achieved! 🚀

We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve successfully transitioned hundreds of our Charts from incubator to stable! This massive endeavor includes dozens of game servers, ensuring more stability and fun for everyone.

🎮 Game On! 🎮

To all the gaming enthusiasts, get ready for enhanced gaming experiences with our latest and more robust game server offerings.

🙏 Support Our Journey 🙏

As we continue to grow and improve, we kindly remind you that donations are always welcome. Your support fuels our passion and helps us maintain and develop even more exciting projects. Consider making a contribution this festive season!

🚨 Transition Notice: Ending support for TrueNAS SCALE Bluefin (22.12) 🚨

Please note, we will be ending support for TrueNAS SCALE Bluefin 22.12.X starting today on 19 December 2023. To continue receiving support and updates in the New Year, we encourage users to upgrade their systems to TrueNAS SCALE Cobia (23.10), which released it’s first update to 23.10.1 on December 19th 2023. We have a large community who can assist you through this important transition on our Discord with channels for #truenas-scale and #scale-apps.

Special Thanks

We want to take a moment to appreciate those who have made our journey so fruitful and new contributors (both directly and indirectly) to bringing TrueCharts to more platforms:

  • Our Staff: For their unwavering dedication and hard work.
  • Code Contributors: Your contributions are the backbone of our progress.
  • Our Community: For your enthusiasm, feedback, and support.
  • Our Donators: Your generosity keeps our mission alive.
  • OpenSource Collective: A big thank you for managing our finances (OpenSource Collective).
  • Ich777: Your game server builds have been invaluable (Ich777 on GitHub).
  • SideroLabs Team: For TalosOS, which we’re excited to support more (SideroLabs).
  • Budimanjojo: For your proactive work on TalHelper, aiding our documentation and support efforts for TalosOS (Budimanjojo on GitHub, TalHelper).

As we look forward to the new year, we’re excited to bring you more updates, enhancements, and surprises. Stay tuned!

Wishing you a joyful and peaceful holiday season.

🌟 Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year from all of us at TrueCharts! 🌟

Exciting Changes on the Horizon in January!

Steven McElligott
Steven McElligott
Head Moderator

As we bid farewell to 2023, we’re thrilled to share a sneak peek into the future of TrueCharts. January 2024 will mark a significant milestone for us as we unveil a host of groundbreaking changes and new features that will elevate your experience with our charts.

Here’s a glimpse of what’s in store:

Improved CloudNative-PG Support

TrueCharts is committed to enhancing your experience with CloudNative-PG. Our upcoming release will bring improvements to ensure seamless integration and optimal performance.

Prototype for CNPG Backups

Data security is a top priority for us. We are introducing a prototype for CloudNative-PG backups to provide you with robust and reliable data protection solutions.

Completely Rewritten Ingress Backend

Our team has reimagined and rewritten the entire ingress backend to offer enhanced functionality, improved performance, and a more intuitive user experience.

Homepage Integration for All Ingresses

As part of our commitment to accessibility, we’re introducing homepage app integration for all ingresses. This integration will streamline navigation and make TrueCharts even more user-friendly. homepage is a modern, fully static, fast, secure fully proxied, highly customizable application dashboard with integrations for over 100 services and translations into multiple languages.

New Options for iSCSI, SMB, and NFS Storage Backend

Diversify your storage options with new features for iSCSI, SMB, and NFS storage backends. TrueCharts is expanding possibilities to cater to a broader range of user preferences and requirements.

What do these changes mean for our current configurations

Seamless Transition for CloudNative-PG Users

For users who haven’t made modifications to their CloudNative-PG configuration, there’s good news. You won’t need to adapt your configuration in the GUI or values.yaml, ensuring a smooth transition to the latest version of TrueCharts implementation of CNPG.

Ingress Value Restructuring

Certain changes to ingress values will be introduced. Detailed information about these changes will be published around the time of the release. We appreciate your patience and cooperation as we work to streamline and optimize our systems.

Stay Up-to-Date for a Smoother Upgrade

To ensure a seamless transition to the next major step in TrueCharts, we strongly advise all users to ensure they are up-to-date before January 1, 2024. This proactive measure should pave the way for a smooth upgrade and prevent reinstallation of certain charts.

Disclaimer

Important Warning: While we work hard to ensure a smooth transition, we cannot guarantee it. Some users might have to reinstall some charts. However, we are confident that this will be an extremely small minority.

The TrueCharts community has been a driving force behind our growth, and we’re excited to embark on this journey with you. We appreciate your continued support and look forward to ushering in a new era of TrueCharts together.

Stay tuned for more updates and details as we approach the release date!

Best regards and happy holidays,

The TrueCharts Team

The End of Container Mirroring

Steven McElligott
Steven McElligott
Head Moderator

In the ever-evolving landscape of containerization and application deployment, TrueCharts has been at the forefront of providing users with streamlined and efficient Helm charts. As TrueCharts continues to prioritize user experience and development efficiency, a notable change is on the horizon – the decision to discontinue mirroring containers. We’ve highlighted below the main reasons for this change.

  • Focusing Dev Time on Innovation: TrueCharts has always been committed to delivering high-quality Helm charts that simplify the deployment of applications on Kubernetes. By discontinuing container mirroring, the development team can now redirect their efforts and time towards enhancing existing charts, introducing new features, and ensuring the overall improvement of the TrueCharts ecosystem. This shift in focus aims to bring users an even more polished and feature-rich experience.

  • Enhanced Clarity for Chart Users: The decision to cease container mirroring brings increased transparency for TrueCharts users. With a clear distinction between containers provided by TrueCharts and those hosted elsewhere, users can easily identify which containers are in use within their deployments. This added clarity fosters a better understanding of the components powering their applications and promotes a more informed and empowered user community.

  • Faster and More Efficient Processing: Our current automated testing, takes a lot of processing time. Part of this is separated testing and releasing of the the container mirror. By removing the container mirror, we can lower the amount of tests run separately by 20%, significantly increasing the speed at which we can follow upstream releases of new versions.

As well, we would like to highlight these two important aspects of this transition below:

  • DockerHub Rate Limits: In a world where some container registries are subject to rate limits, this change does mean users might hit rate-limits when pulling certain containers. Especially those from dockerhub. If this is the case, please contact the container creator and request they use a different container registry.

  • Gradual Transition for Current Users: Change can be daunting, especially for existing users accustomed to a certain workflow. Therefore, the discontinuation of container mirroring will not impact current users for at least a year. During this transition period, users can continue to benefit from mirrored images while TrueCharts prepares them for the upcoming change through clear communication and support.

  • Seamless and Non-Breaking Change: TrueCharts is committed to making this transition as seamless as possible. Users can expect a non-disruptive experience, with no breaking changes to their current deployments. TrueCharts will provide comprehensive support to guide users through the transition, ensuring that the shift away from mirroring is a smooth and hassle-free process.

Conclusion:

As TrueCharts takes this strategic step towards discontinuing container mirroring, the focus remains on user experience, transparency, and efficient development. By embracing this change, TrueCharts aims to provide users with an even more robust platform for deploying applications on Kubernetes. As the containerization landscape continues to evolve, TrueCharts remains dedicated to simplifying the deployment process and empowering users with the tools they need for success.

Stability Tiers and Helm Support

Kjeld Schouten
Kjeld Schouten
Maintainer & Founder of TrueCharts

We’re very glad to announce a new step in our project: Stability Tiers.

What are Stability Tiers?

Stability Tiers is a tier list of platforms supported by TrueCharts, ranked by how well we think our Charts function on each platform. Of course, all platforms get full access to community support, but we want to give realistic expectations on how many “snags” users can experience on the platform of their choice.

Improved First-Tier Helm Support

With the new tiers, we are also finally ready to announce that we’ve completed the required work to officially release our Normal Helm Charts as a first-tier supported platform. This also means that our industry-leading community support is now available for Helm users!

We want to make clear that, just as with SCALE, not every setting we offer is going to work well with every Chart. Sadly, we have not documented this very well, if at all. In the future, we want to document the release state (Experimental or GA) clearly for each Helm option in the documentation.

TrueNAS SCALE and Its Tier

While previously we’ve seen great effort and interest from the developers of TrueNAS SCALE, iXsystems, there’s been a shift in priorities towards limiting Kubernetes support and prioritising their own catalogs at the cost of third parties like TrueCharts. We’ve also noticed a shift away from their previous plans to support multi-node clusters, accompanied by a disappointing disregard for providing any decent backup utility for their platform.

At the same time, we’ve been working hard on hardening our pipelines by signing both our container builds and Helm Charts. Sadly, TrueNAS SCALE, due to explicit design choices by iXsystems, also does not offer any tooling to ensure Helm Charts have their signatures validated before installation. This leads us to conclude that TrueNAS SCALE Apps are inherently less secure and professional than Helm Charts.

All in all, and after long deliberation, this has led us to decide to move TrueNAS SCALE to a “Second Tier” platform, as we cannot fully guarantee the same stability and reliability that normal Helm offers. This, however, does not mean a decrease in development efforts. We’re still planning to fully support the platform where we can and expand both the catalog and our feature set on there in the future.

What it does mean is that some features might be slightly less reliable due to poorly designed “middleware” that is part of TrueNAS SCALE, which we, sadly enough, cannot do much against.

Future Platforms

However, there is more! We’re also glad to announce we’re working on supporting two more ways of deploying our Helm charts:

  • FluxCD
  • Rancher

For FluxCD, we hope to create a catalog of pre-made helm-release+kustomize files that can be readily copy-pasted into your GitOps repository! Even better, we’re working hard to automate the deployment of GitOps with Flux, Sops-Encryption, and even a dedicated operating system: Talos-OS!

For Rancher, while you can already load our helm charts into Rancher and edit the YAML like any other Helm Chart, we are planning to add custom Rancher GUI elements to each and every published Helm chart. Just like with SCALE, but this time fully Kubernetes aware without complicated middleware!

The Tier List

This leads us to the following Stability Tier List, which will be documented on the website insert link here and adapted where needed:

  1. Helm
  2. TrueNAS SCALE

We hope this gives users more clarity on which platform to pick and what experience to expect. We’re super stoked to expand this list in the future to support more awesome platforms!