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The Future of TrueCharts

Kjeld Schouten
Kjeld Schouten
Maintainer & Founder of TrueCharts

Two and a half years ago, we started as nothing but a fork of the k8s-at-home project with added support for TrueNAS SCALE. But since then, we’ve grown quickly and surpassed k8s-at-home in many ways with our fresh custom-made common-chart.

Our focus on providing easy-to-use and reliable Helm charts for various applications has been steadily gaining popularity. As our SCALE support solidifies, we’ve been getting more and more questions about supporting other Kubernetes-based platforms. And we want you to know that we’ve been listening!

Recently, we made the first steps towards giving other platforms the attention they deserve by fixing the release workflow for building a normal Helm repository. Starting Q2 2023, we plan to slowly but steadily begin work on supporting Rancher as well, including full GUI support!

You may slowly see changes in things like our documentation structure, Discord channels, and YouTube video names, including the inevitable broken links. But we believe it will be worth it, lets say “for the greater good”…

In addition to expanding our platform support, we’ve also been secretly working on a complete redesign of our project to match our new multi-platform goals. We’re keeping the redesigns a semi-secret for now, but we’re certain that everyone will be amazed by the incredible artwork our designers have come up with!

But we’re not done yet! With the growth of the project and much feedback (Special shoutout to @HeavyBullets from https://heavysetup.info/), it slowly became clear that we couldn’t both build amazing Charts/Apps and offer specialized tools for the platforms we build for. We want to focus on what we’re good at: building those amazing charts.

Taking everything into account and with some pain in our hearts, but also knowing there is a very good alternative out there called “HeavyScript,” we’ve decided to drop development of TrueTool. We would advise everyone to migrate to HeavyScript, which offers a very similar featureset and workflow as the good ‘ol TrueTool!

Overall, we’re excited for what the future holds for the TrueCharts project. We’re committed to providing easy-to-use and reliable Helm charts for our users, and we’re always looking for ways to improve. We believe that focusing on what we do best will allow us to do even more for our users and the community.

Breaking Changes: Enterprise

Kjeld Schouten
Kjeld Schouten
Maintainer & Founder of TrueCharts

As part of our March breaking change update of all our apps, we’re glad to announce the first round of updates:

  • Dependency train has been updated, except “Collabora” and “Postgresql” which will be moved to the “stable” train later
  • Enterprise train has been updated
  • Vaultwarden has been added to the enterprise train
  • Authelia has been added to the enterprise train
  • Blocky gained backend support for more query logging options, which will later be added the the TrueNAS SCALE GUI.

We’ve done considerable testing to validate if, and how, we could add automated migration. But the changes are so significant, that the chance of things breaking is many times too high. So while we’re sorry for the inconvenience, users will likely have to reinstall many of their Apps this month.

Luckily enough, the enterprise train did not contain anything using Postgresql databases, so you don’t have to worry about updates nuking databases.

But on the topic of nuking databases: We’re working internally on a script to export all your postgresql databases, which will be released before the stable train will get it’s round of updates. That way you don’t have to manually export all those sql files.

Important

We want to repeat that this will be a breaking change. While some Apps/Charts might update without issue, many will not.

In those cases, the only solution is to reinstall. Due to the fact that the complete backend is rewritten from scratch, it’s simply too much for us to write.

Highlighted changes

We want to highlight some of the biggest changes, as there are some real showstealers in this update to make it worth it!

Cert-Manager Certificates

We’re heard many of you complain about flaky and limited certificate behavior on TrueNAS SCALE. It’s understandable people are upset and so are we.

To ensure users have an actually solid experience, we’ve decided to implement the current industry leading certificates solution: Cert-Manager. It supports more forms of certificates, is faster to setup and is build by people that are actually specialized in certificate management. Which, lets be realistic, NAS developers are not.

Later this month, we’ll release some guides for setting it up, but here’s some screenshots:

Cert-Manager App

Configurable Cloud Native Postgresql

This is our biggest change this release. We moved to a completely different postgresql backend. Backed by CloudNative Postgresql, a kubernetes operator for postgresql.

You might ask “what the heck is an operator”, in short it’s a solution to have a specialized project maintain deployments of things within kubernetes. They write code to ensure things like: updates, upscaling, downscaling and deployment go smoothly. Basically the same thing as Cert-Manager does for certificates, CloudNative Postgresql does for Postgresql Databases.

The upside to this is that we can be certain your database deployments are designed by people that are specialized in the database you want to have deployed. It limits your risk of data-loss and our work of maintaining it. Simply put, your database deployments should be managed by a specialist in databases, not by NAS or Helm-Charts developers.

Postgresql Settings

Enterprise Train and breaking changes

We also want to announce and put-in-place a new breaking-changes policy for the Enterprise train. Which will take effect 01-04-2023:

  • All Charts in the Enterprise train, will get one-by-one attention to write migration scripts where possible
  • If there are breaking changes, we will write migration guides for each of them, customized where needed
  • Breaking changes will be announced at least 3 months in advance and older versions (pre-breaking-change) will continue to be supported for at least 3 months afterwards (so at least 6 months after the announcement of a breaking change)
  • In the future help with migrations will, obviously, be included in the priority enterprise support packages that come with our future SLA offerings for the Enterprise Apps

These measure should ensure users that require our Apps for production use, are not surprised again with unwanted breaking changes in the future. While, at the same time, everything stays available for everyone to work with, for free.

New breaking common release

Kjeld Schouten
Kjeld Schouten
Maintainer & Founder of TrueCharts

One of the core components of TrueCharts is our “common” chart, which serves as the basis on which all other charts are built.

The common chart is a massive collection of thousands of lines of code that provide a wide range of features and optimizations for all apps running on the TrueCharts platform. From November of last year until now, the TrueCharts team has been working tirelessly to completely rewrite the common chart from scratch. They’ve also incorporated feedback from the community, including feature requests and bug reports, to ensure that the new common chart meets the needs of all users.

After many months of work, the TrueCharts team is excited to announce that the new common chart is almost here! However, there are some important things that users should be aware of before upgrading. Firstly, deployment of the new common chart will take place in March 2023, and all container updates will be frozen for a month. The new common chart will be deployed in stages for the Enterprise, Dependency (except postgresql), Incubator, and April trains, and then to the stable train and postgresql dependency. This means that users may need to reinstall certain apps, and some settings such as replicas and securityContext will be reset.

Users with PostgreSQL apps will need to be aware that their databases will be nuked, so they will need to take appropriate backups before upgrading. Additionally, users will need to disable VPN before updating, as the new common chart uses a different database backend that allows for the implementation of much-requested backup features and exposes more PostgreSQL settings in the GUI in the future.

Despite these temporary inconveniences, the new common chart promises to deliver many improvements to the TrueCharts platform. For example, there is a new VPN addon based on “Gluetun,” which offers more support for OpenVPN and Wireguard and is a maintained project. This addon will replace the old “OpenVPN” and “WireGuard” options. The new common chart also includes the option to mount a config folder for OpenVPN and the option to mount OpenVPN config directly in values.yaml for native helm users.

There is also an all-new PostgreSQL backend based on “CloudNative-PG,” which supports backup, high-availability, connection pooling, and split RW/RO. Multi-pod support is also now available, which includes potential future GUI compatibility. The new common chart also features automatic detection for env-var conflicts, build-in support for jobs and cronjobs, and a completely new certificate backend based on the industry standard “Cert-Manager.”

In conclusion, the new common chart is a significant update that promises to deliver many improvements and optimizations to the TrueCharts platform. Users should take note of the deployment schedule and be prepared for some temporary inconveniences. However, the long-term benefits of the new common chart should far outweigh any short-term disruptions.

*Summarised:

March will be deployment month, which has the following consequences (until 01-04-2023):

  • In March, we will code freeze all container updates for 1 month
  • During March we will start deploying the new common in stages for the Enterprise, Dependency (except postgresql), Incubator and April trains and in that order.
  • During we will start deploying the new common to the stable train and postgresql dependency.
  • Users might have to reinstall certain apps
  • All apps will have some settings reset such as: replica’s, securityContext etc.
  • Postgresql Apps will automatically nuke their databases
  • Users will have to disable VPN before updating
  • Users will be explained that this is due to moving to a different database backend that allows us to implement the much wanted backup features and expose more postgresql settings in the GUI in the future

A short example of some of the many improvements in the new common chart:

  • A new VPN addon based on “Gluetun”, which offers much more support for OpenVPN and Wireguard and is an actually maintained project (security etc.) It will replace the old “OpenVPN” and “WireGuard” options.
  • The option to (also) mount a config folder instead of just a configfile for OpenVPN.
  • The option to mount OpenVPN config directly in values.yaml, for native helm users
  • An All-New Postgresql backend based on “CloudNative-PG”, supporting things like: Backup, High-Availability, Connection Pooling, Split RW/RO
  • Multi-Pod support, including potential future GUI compatibility.
  • Automatic detection for Env-var conflicts, if user entered custom env-vars conflict with pre-defined ones
  • Build-in support for Jobs and CronJobs, without customizations on a per-app basis.
  • A completely new certificate backend based on the industry standard “Cert-Manager”.
  • Much more hardening of defaults, based on (now automated and required) security scans backed by Datree
  • Much expanded testing suite, counting hundreds of tests for thousands of features

About TrueNAS SCALE 22.12.1

Kjeld Schouten
Kjeld Schouten
Maintainer & Founder of TrueCharts

iXsystems just released TrueNAS SCALE 22.12.1 into the wild.

We’ve went ahead and reviewed the release notes, available here

There aren’t any changes that should prevent apps from functioning moving from 22.12 to 22.12.1. Hence we’ve decided to expand support for our Apps to both versions as well.

Please be aware, however, that both migration and backups are broken in 22.12, which are both fixed in 22.12.1. So we would still heavily advice anyone to update. Although the TrueTool hotpatch for 22.12, solves the issues for most users as well.

Our Christmas with iXsystems

Kjeld Schouten
Kjeld Schouten
Maintainer & Founder of TrueCharts

At TrueCharts, we are grateful for the support of our partners, especially during the festive season. We were thrilled when iXsystems reached out to us during the holiday season to show their appreciation for the hard work and dedication of our staff to both the TrueNAS SCALE and TrueCharts projects in 2022.

iX Merch image 1

In the past month and a half, packages started to arrive, and they were as amazing as we had expected. Our team was grateful for this extra gesture, which added to the holiday cheer and served as a recognition of the efforts they put into both projects.

iX Merch image 1

We would like to extend our heartfelt thanks to iXsystems for their generosity and support. We wish them all the best for 2023 and look forward to working on some exciting projects together in the future.