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.
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!
We are excited to announce that the TrueCharts project has undergone a makeover with a fresh new look! Our team has been working hard behind the scenes to bring you a new logo, logo animations, and headers is clean, modern, and easily recognizable, making it a perfect representation of what TrueCharts is all about.
We’ve also created logo animations that bring our new logo to life. These new logo animations will help us stand out and make a lasting impression on our audience.
In addition to the new look, we’re thrilled to announce that we’ve launched our official merch store on Etsy!
By purchasing from our merch store, you’re not only getting a cool piece of TrueCharts swag, but you’re also supporting our project. Every purchase helps us continue to develop and improve our platform, making it the best Helm and App repository out there!
We’re very excited about the new look and the launch of our merch store, and we hope you are too. Stay tuned for more exciting news and updates from the TrueCharts project, as we continue to grow and evolve!
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.
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:
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.
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.
