pump.io

Well, apparently I forgot to make a blog post announcing that pump.io 4.0.0 stable is out. Surprise! Besides the version number it's the same as 4.0 beta 5 anyway.

What is not the same as 4.0 beta 5, however, is the security releases I've just published. A semver-major release went out within the past 6 months, so per our security support policy, we've released security patches for the past three stable releases:

1. pump.io 4.0.0 has been updated to pump.io 4.0.1
2. pump.io 3.0.2 has been updated to pump.io 3.0.3
3. pump.io 2.1.1 has been updated to pump.io 2.1.2

So what exactly required these releases? Well, the library we use to prevent cross-site scripting, DOMPurify, released some security patches recently. While we could conceivably just tell pump.io users to rerun npm install -g to get the updated library, it seemed safer to issue patch releases that bumped the minimum version for DOMPurify and have people upgrade to those. This gives a 100% guarantee that pump.io users will be protected with the absolute latest DOMPurify version.

As with any security release, we encourage admins to upgrade ASAP. If you've already installed the 4.0 release via npm, that's great! That's our recommended configuration, and you'll be able to upgrade by issuing:

$ npm install -g pump.io@4

If you're still on the 3.x release series, you really should upgrade to 4.x, which contains significant work impacting security which was too big to go into a patch release (specifically, the upgrade to Express 4.x). But in the meantime, you can fix your XSS problems by running:

$ npm install -g pump.io@3

And something similar if you're on 2.1.x:

$ npm install -g pump.io@2

Though in this case it's even more urgent that you upgrade to 4.x.

Note that the above comands also assume you have an npm-based install, which we strongly recommend. If you have a source-based install, you will need to upgrade however you usually do - this will depend on how exactly you have pump.io set up.

As always, if you need help, get in touch with the community.

pump.io 4.0.0 is officially in beta! Whooo!

Highlights

This is a positively huge release, and I'm so excited to share it with the community. Some highlights:

• Express 4.x - I wrote about the significance of this change here, but suffice to say that this significantly improves security, performance, and future maintainability
• Performance and correctness improvements to the web UI's JavaScript
• Better administrative experience, including the ability to specify configuration via environment variables
• Better interoperability with the IndieWeb

Upgrading

The upgrade to Express 4.x and the improvements to configuration loading have the potential to break some existing pump.io installations, although 95% of installs should be completely unaffected. If you want to help test this beta, please set aside extra time as necessary to perform this upgrade - full documentation can be found on ReadTheDocs.

As always, this release will follow our normal release cycle, which means that the stable 4.0.0 release will go out in about a month.

Test days

Due to the complexity of this upgrade, we've decided to have some test days during the beta where we upgrade prominent nodes for a day, then downgrade them again. This will help expose problems earlier and make the upgrade smoother for everyone. So far Jason Self, who runs Datamost, has volunteered for this - if you're interested in joining him, please get in touch!

Happy hacking!

Greetings!

After a beta period of just over a week, pump.io 2.0.4 is now available on npm and GitHub. Whoohoo!

(This was originally going to be 2.0.0, but we had to do a couple patch releases due to some outdated documentation and several critical bugs. 2.0.4 is mostly the same thing as 2.0.0.)

Changes

Note that this release includes security improvements - namely, a newer Express version and a better TLS configuration - and therefore admins are encouraged to upgrade ASAP.

For the full list of changes, see the change log.

Breaking changes

(As I said in the beta announcement:)

Pump.io 2.0.4 is a drop-in replacement for 1.0.0 unless you have any plugins configured or you modify the templates.

Plugins are likely to be affected by the upgrade to Express 3.x. The easiest way to migrate is probably to just run pump.io, test out the relevant parts of the app, and see where your plugin crashes. You might also want to look at the Express 3 change log.

If you modified the templates, you'll be affected by the templates' rewrite from utml into Jade. Migration should be relatively painless but has to be done manually. Your best bet will be to save a copy of the diff you created, undo your changes, upgrade, then use the diff you saved to reintroduce your changes. You'll have to run npm run build after making changes to Jade files.

Non-breaking changes

This release is actually relatively minor in terms of non-breaking changes; however, we do have some nice new improvements:

• A pump(1) manpage is now included
• Any internal web UI link with a data-bypass attribute is now ignored by the routing logic (useful for e.g. custom pages added by the admin)
• YouTube links in posts are now shown as embeds by the web UI (#1158)
• TLS connections now use Mozilla's "intermediate" cipher suite and forces server cipher suite preferences (#1061)
• Various minor fixes and improvements

Upgrading

Upgrading is dead-simple. If you used our recommended install method, and installed from npm, you can upgrade with:

sudo npm install -g pump.io@2

If you installed from source, you can upgrade with:

git fetch
# If you modified templates, save the diff at this step
git checkout .
git checkout v2.0.4
npm install
# Restore your template changes
npm run lint:jade # Optional but recommended if you changed templates
npm run build

Both of these methods will work whether you're running 0.3.0, 1.0.0, or 2.0.0 beta. Make sure to restart pump.io after performing the upgrade.

Getting help

If you have any issues with the upgrade, get in touch with the community. You can also email me at alex@strugee.net.

Greetings!

As pump.io is gearing up for our 2.0.0 release, I just published a beta to npm. We'd love it if any interested admins could upgrade their nodes and report any bugs you may run in to. (All bug reports are helpful, but just so we're clear, we're likely to only fix regressions from 1.0.0.)

Changes

Pump.io 2.0.0 beta is a drop-in replacement for 1.0.0 unless you have any plugins configured or you modify the templates.

Plugins are likely to be affected by the upgrade to Express 3.x. The easiest way to migrate is probably to just run pump.io, test out the relevant parts of the app, and see where your plugin crashes. You might also want to look at the Express 3 change log.

If you modified the templates, you'll be affected by the templates' rewrite from utml into Jade. Migration should be relatively painless but has to be done manually. Your best bet will be to save a copy of the diff you created, undo your changes, upgrade, then use the diff you saved to reintroduce your changes. You'll have to run npm run build after making changes to Jade files.

For the list of non-breaking changes, see the change log.

Upgrading

Upgrading is very easy. If you used our recommended install method, and installed from npm, you can upgrade to the beta with:

sudo npm install -g pump.io@beta

If you installed from source, you can upgrade with:

git fetch
# If you modified templates, save the diff at this step
git checkout .
git checkout v2.0.0-beta.1
npm install
# Restore your template changes
npm run lint:jade # Optional but recommended if you changed templates
npm run build

Make sure to restart pump.io after performing the upgrade.

Getting help

If you have any issues upgrading to or running the beta, please don't hesitate to get in touch with the community. You can also email me at alex@strugee.net.

Pump.io 1.0.0 is officially available! Whoooo!

I just wanted to write up an announcement real quick to celebrate. Here's a sample what's gone into this release:

• Node 4.x support
• Lots of security improvements including a better cross-site scripting scrubber and security-related headers that help protect the web UI (most notably, the web UI now declares a Content Security Policy)
• Minor improvements to the API to make it (slightly) smarter
• LibreJS support
• Numerous dependency upgrades, most notably Connect
• And of course, tons of minor bugfixes and improvements

For more details, see the brand-new change log.

And of course since we're now past 0.x.x releases, we're now officially making a commitment to the community to make only API-compatible changes going forward (or at least, until 2.0.0!).

As this release does improve security and fixes a lot of bugs, node administrators are encouraged to upgrade as soon as possible. If you have a global, npm-based install, you can upgrade with:

sudo npm install -g pump.io

And with a source-based install:

git pull
git checkout v1.0.0
npm install --production

If you're upgrading from 0.3.0, everything should Just Work(tm). Don't forget to restart your daemon!

One final note - the rumors are true. While we're not doing so yet, we are, in fact, planning to deprecate running under Node.js 0.10 and 0.12 very soon. Also, if you upgrade to Node.js 4.x early, the new, better XSS scrubber will be enabled - however, be aware that pump.io is far less tested under Node.js 4.x and you are likely to run into more bugs than you would under 0.10 or 0.12. This is an unfortunate situation, but sadly there's really nothing to be done about it. :(

Special thanks to Menno Vossen, Laura Arjona, Evan Prodromou, Jan Kusanagi and all the other volunteers who did so many different things to make this release happen. It truly wouldn't have happened without you.

Enjoy the release!

With <3,

AJ