UBOS Beta 17 available

There is lots of new stuff in this update. But before we get there:

This is the last of the increasingly inaccurately named “beta XXX updates”. UBOS has been fairly stable for some time, and our “beta” labels are a throw-back to the past when that wasn’t necessarily true. So going forward, we will stop using the term “beta”. Instead, we will focus on the distinction between the different release channels, and at what version they are at. If you check UBOS on GitHub, you’ll see that the milestone labels have already been renamed.

Here are some of the highlights on what is new in beta (ahem!) 17, currently available on the yellow release channel only:

• ubos-admin is now in color! (On terminals that support it.) That makes entering the correct information in commands such as ubos-admin createsite visually much simpler. It also makes it easier to distinguish between informational messages and errors.

• ubos-admin backup is now the unified command for all backups in UBOS. Extra commands like ubos-admin backup-to-amazon-s3 are gone. ubos-admin backup can do it all, and more! It has learned not only to back up to local files, and to Amazon S3, but also to remote hosts with protocols such as ftp, sftp, scp, rsync, http and https. All that’s needed is to specify a backup destination with the protocol prefix, such as s3://mybucket/myfile.

• ubos-admin backup can also encrypt backups automatically, and the key management for that has become much simpler.

• Upgrades have become faster, and require less storage.

• The UBOS documentation now exists in two places:

  • at ubos.net/docs, as before, you find the documentation for the green (“production”) release channel.

  • at ubos.net/docs-yellow, which is new, you find the documentation for the yellow (“beta”) release channel. (Updated: merged back together)

  As UBOS gets promoted through the release channels, new features will first show up on yellow, and its documentation section, and later make it into green. That clears up some confusion where sometimes the documentation seemed to say one thing, but the software did something else: now you can refer to the documentation that goes with your release channel.

• As usual, lots of other smaller improvements and fixes of bugs and annoyances.

The more detailed release notes are here.