TrueCharts News

Updates recontinued, common-migration mostly done

May 1, 2023

We’re glad to finally announce the end of our code-freeze. Since a few days we’ve re-enabled our automatic updates and within a few weeks everything should balance out again automatically!

At the same time, we’ve not completely finished porting all stable-train charts to the new common, 65 are still missing. But we’ve clearly label those updates as breaking in the changelog when they come in. Most of those are charts that have more complications than anticipated, so need a little quality time with our maintainers which takes a while.

Known Issues

Now that we’re mostly done, we also need to report a few known issues with the new backend:

DO NOT USE THE STOP BUTTON

The Stop button should not be used on any TrueNAS SCALE Apps that uses postgreSQL. Due to severe design mistakes by iXsystems, it will get into an endless loop and never finish. We’re reported the issue to iXsystems and they are not interested in fixing this.

PostgreSQL breaking on reboot

We’ve seen some edge cases where the new database backend breaks after a reboot. Often after the STOP button was used, though we cannot trace the issue down back to the use of the stop button itself. These issues are reported to the folks over at CNPG and we’ve also thrown them an email to discuss whether we can fund them to fix these issues.

hostNetworking changes

After much R&D, our staff have discovered quite a few nasty kubernetes-level bugs with hostNetworking. As a result, we’ve decided to never enable it by default anymore on any of our charts/apps, as we cannot guarantee its stability. For some charts that, often, require this setting (like tailscale), users would have to manually and explicitly enable it from now on.

The setting has also moved in the GUI.

Deprecated certificate system and you

With most Charts ported, we want to highlight the fact that the “TrueNAS SCALE (Deprecated)” certificate option, should not be used anymore. We cannot guarantee it’s stability nor can do anything at-all to help out. It will also be removed as an option in the future, though that will be months rather than weeks.

The future

With the charts slowly all being ported, we can start working on our long-term plans again. One of those plans is a renewed focus on native Helm Charts.

For May and June, we’re planning to go all-in on improving documentation for use of our charts as normal Helm charts. At the same time we’re going to work on ensuring all our SCALE specific tricks (of which only a few are left, luckily), will have automatic alternatives for normal kubernetes clusters.

To highlight this, we’ve asked Artifact hub, to highlight our Common-Library chart, as an “official” TrueCharts Helm chart. All users of helm should be able to use the power of this advanced common-library, to build the Helm Charts they please… Without even relying on TrueCharts to host their charts for them!

Check it out here and also check out the docs as always.

*Arr revert

Apr 18, 2023

Kjeld Schouten

Ops and R&D Lead

While most of our migration to new common worked out reasonably well, we’ve received many issues with regards to another change. Our change for the “Arr” Apps, like Radarr and Prowlarr, to their new Postgresql backend ended up terribly.

We did not correctly anticipate how hard that migration was going to be for our users and also encountered a number of bugs and design mistakes for those Apps. After long consideration and attempted bug-fixing, we’ve decided to revert the move to Postgreqsql for the “Arr” Apps, back to sqlite.

This also means that after next change (which will be flagged as breaking due to moving back the database change) you will also be able to neatly import your “Arr” App backups from old common again.

We’ve very sorry for this revert and we completely understand that we should’ve done considerably more research before implementing this move to a different database version. The revert should be made available shortly, within 24 hours.

Common Porting Progress

Apr 14, 2023

Kjeld Schouten

Ops and R&D Lead

We’re close to releasing releasing the breaking port of another 50+ of our “Stable” train charts to the new common train. With this, we want to look back on a few things we’ve noticed with the initial release:

Breaking Changes

Generally speaking, any change in the first semver digit of our versions, means a potentially breaking changes. How much this affects you, usually is effected by both the updates and your personal setup. In this specific case, we want to make extra clear that 99.9% of our SCALE Apps will require manual reinstall.

For SCALE: This also means anything in databases is going to be completely wiped unless you’ve HeavyScript/TrueTool backups and/or have followed one or more of our community migration guides. We should’ve been more clear that this behavior includes any and all databases and is not limited to MariaDB. Sadly enough this “wipe on App deletion” is a design in TrueNAS SCALE and not something we have influence over.

Our Helm users would, in most cases, with adapting their current values(.yaml) file in accordance with the new structure. though databases will still get wiped when doing the update.

GPU Support

GPU support took two snags:

One was an obscure SCALE bug where dicts with one item didn’t get rendered in the GUI (and it’s output) accordingly. We’ve created a temporary patch for this to compensate
The other was a minor permission issue, namely an additional group that should’ve been passed that got lost in development-translation from old to new common

Both are by now resolved and (being) rolled out. In the future we plan to prevent at least the first issue more thoroughly by manually checking if the interface behaves correctly when doing big GUI changes.

Addons

We’re still having some issues getting the Addons, primarily the VPN addon, behaving correctly. Mostly this is due to significantly increased hardening of our default kubernetes deployment. We expect this to be fixed within a week or two, in the mean time users depending on our charts being used with VPN might want to wait a little.

Discord

There is some annoyance over the fact we use Discord for support. We’re aware of this and are actually contemplating moving to another platform (as well). Sadly enough we do not have unlimited time available to work on the new common, release a new branding style and expand support to another platform. Users can expect a Discord alternative either end of 2023 or somewhere in 2024.

Verbal Abuse

A much less okay subject is the fact multiple of our staff members have suffered verbal abuse of varying degrees. Some have even led to cases where platform (reddit, discord etc.) needed to step in to take action. While sometimes a staff response might seem a tad blunt or not to your liking, some of the things we’ve seen are completely and utterly unacceptable. We’ve a head moderator, JagrBombs if you’ve any issue with a staff member.

We’ve taken steps to prevent needlessly exposing our staff to this. One of which is limiting our presence within certain communities on an as-needed basis.

Conclusion

In the end we’ve gotten a lot of feedback on the new release. Understandably many users are/where upset a reinstall was required. We want to highlight that we understand the frustration, but with the scope of these changes, a complete rewrite of our Common backend, we didn’t have much choice on SCALE. It’s important to note, that users on SCALE cannot update via the update button in almost all cases, so users do not have to worry about magically losing data by using the update button for this release.

Another topic we’ve seen mentioned was “but they say they are production ready”, we want to be completely clear about this: TrueCharts is not production ready at this time. In the future, after a separate announcement, only our “Enterprise” train will be considered “production ready”. We want to highlight that this does not mean “stable” users can expect these breaking changes more often, as we don’t plan to put another 700+ hours into the common chart any time soon. But it does mean, users should NEVER depend on our stable train for production, unless they do so on their own risk.

We wish all our users the best in going through these migrations and our support staff is available on Discord if you need any help.

Post Easter Stable Update

Apr 11, 2023

Kjeld Schouten

Ops and R&D Lead

Hope everyone had an amazing easter, we know we had a busy one to say the least!

We are excited to announce that we have completed porting the first 222 charts in our “stable” train to our new “common” library chart. This chart serves as the basis for all of our apps and charts, and we believe that it will provide a more stable and reliable foundation for all of our future work.

While there are still over 160 charts left to be ported in our stable train, we expect to complete this work before the end of the month. To ensure that we have sufficient time to complete this work, we are extending our code freeze for the stable train until May 1, 2023. After this date, we guarantee that we will resume our normal update schedule.

In addition, we want to make it clear that we have lifted the code freeze for our “Enterprise” and “Dependency” charts, and will continue to provide updates for these charts on a regular basis.

It is important to note that this update is considered “most likely breaking,” and will likely wipe all databases used in charts. We also anticipate that there may be some regressions, which is why we encourage users to file bug reports or contact our support staff if they experience any issues.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank our community for their patience and understanding as we work to improve our platform. We believe that these updates will provide significant benefits in terms of stability, reliability, and functionality, and we look forward to sharing them with our users in the coming weeks and months.

As always, we welcome any feedback or suggestions from our users, and we remain committed to providing the best possible experience for everyone who uses our platform. Thank you again for your support, and we look forward to continuing to work with you in the future.

A new ChartsList

Mar 24, 2023

Kjeld Schouten

Ops and R&D Lead

After a lot of work by @xstar and review by our staff, we’ve finally officially released our new fancy charts list. It’s now easier than ever to search and provides all the basics at a single glance! Check it out the charts list

At the same time, we’ve decided to remove/hide the list with default ports and paths. We feel that, in due time, this info should be added to our documentation on a per-application basis, on top of that it often lead to confusion as things like ports are not always as simple as they look in a spreadsheet.

As a side-note, we want to highlight the fact TrueTool is not developed anymore and the repository removed. We want to advice everyone to support @heavyBullets and use HeavyScript

HeavyScript is now also featuring special fixes, to ensure TrueCharts SCALE Apps can be stopped if they cannot be stopped in the GUI. This comes in very handy when you want to mount your PVC volumes for maintenance, check it out!

We hope that these changes makes it easier to use TrueCharts for everyone, even those that have not yet picket-out the Chart they want to use!