Last night I officially published pump.io 5.1 to npm as a stable release!

As I wrote in the beta announcement, this release contains a variety of improvements:

• Zero-downtime restarts, which allows administrators to seamlessly roll over to new configurations and codebases
• The daemon now generates startup log warnings on bad configurations, including insecure secret values and internal parameters
• An official Dockerfile is now included with the release
• The logged-out mobile homepage's menu icon is no longer incorrectly styled as black
• An authorization problem with SockJS connections has been fixed

5.1 stable does include one change the beta didn't: a bump to the version of the gm npm package which we depend on. This bump was done as a precautionary measure, as previous versions of gm depended on a version of the debug module which was vulnerable to denial-of-service security bugs.

As a project, we addressed these bugs back in October when we issued security releases for all supported release branches, and at the time we confirmed that the vulnerable function wasn't used by gm. Today's gm bump does not constitute a security release; instead, we're just bumping the version as a precautionary measure in case we missed something in October's assessment of the situation.

Aside from the gm bump, there are (as usual) miscellaneous version bumps included in this release. We've also started tracking test suite coverage information as well as overhauled our documentation on ReadTheDocs, moving most of the in-repository documentation there.

If you want even more details of this release, you can also check out the changelog.

pump 5.1 is a drop-in replacement for 5.0. That means if you're using our recommended installation method and installing from npm, you can upgrade with npm install -g pump.io@5.1. If you have a source-based install, you should merge and/or switch to the v5.1.0 tag. And as always, if you encounter any problems, please feel free to reach out to the community or file bugs you find.

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn't point out that pump.io has a brand-new announcement mailing list! While the blog is great for announcing new releases, not everyone finds it convenient to check. Also, if we issue new betas in the middle of a release cycle, these aren't typically announced on the blog. Therefore in the future all new releases will be announced on the mailing list, not just initial betas. If you want to subscribe to the mailing list, you may do so here - you'll get announcements of new features only, not e.g. feature announcements as seen on this blog. I hope people find this service useful!