We are happy to announce the availability of the release candidate branch of Friendica 2021.12, which was just branched off the current development branch, to focus on fixing existing bugs and smoothing out of rough edges. If you want to help in this process, you can checkout the 2021.21-rc branch from the git repositories (core and addons).
Note that you only need to pull the composer dependencies in the core repository. Alternatively you may download the tar archives from files.friendi.ca
Most work has been spend to the internal code of Friendica, so there may be problems lurking underneath the surface. We have deprecated a number of unsupported addons, added Arabic translation and a new WebDAV storage backend. For a full list of changes, please have a look into the CHANGELOG for this release.
Thanks for testing the new release! If you find any problems, please report them either at the issue tracker on github or in the support forum.
Should the upgrade process of the database get stuck
If you encounter this, please initiate the DB update manually from the command line by running the script
./bin/console dbstructure update
from the base of your Friendica installation. If the output contains any error message, please let us know using the channels mentioned above.
Following our tradition of annual Hackathons we will gather together at the first weekend in October (Friday 1st to Sunday 3rd). As it was the case last year, the 2021 Hackathon will be online again. Further information on how to join will be posted in this conversation in the developers Forum.
If you want to join the Hackathon, please do so! No programming skills required for discussions and feedback is welcome.
We are pleased to announce that we branched off the 2021.09 release candidate from the current development branch in preparation to the upcoming release. Over the summer scheduled postings were implemented and the admin panels look into the log file got some refurbishment. For a more detailed list of changes, please see pull request 10621.
If you want to help to hunt down rough edges and bugs ahead of the release in June, now is the perfect moment to switch from the stable or development branch to the freshly created 2021.09-rc branch. To do so please run
in the root directory of your Friendica and the addon directory. The command to update the dependencies (composer) is only necessary in the Friendica root directory.
Thanks for testing the new release! If you find any problems, please report them either at the issue tracker on github or in the support forum.
Please note that the minimal PHP version that Friendica is requiring with this release will be PHP 7.2.
Should the DB update process get stuck
If you encounter this, please initiate the DB update manually from the command line by running the script
./bin/console dbstructure update
from the base of your Friendica installation. If the output contains any error message, please let us know using the channels mentioned above.
We are very happy to announce the availability of the new stable release of Friendica “Siberian Iris” 2021.07. This release contains 219 pull requests from ten contributors and the work of the translation teams. While fixing some problems identified, we have added some nice features
In that version we introduced views to the database and some node admins reported that they had to adjust their MariaDB configuration (table_definition_cache). Also setting pdo_emulate_prepares to true in the Friendica configuration might be nessessary.
Pre-Update Procedures
Ensure that the last backup of your Friendica installation was done recently. We had no problems reported during the upgrade process from 2021.04 to the 2021.06 release candidate, so hopefully you will have a smooth transition.
Please make sure to use Barracuda as MySQL DB file format for your Friendica database. Change your database settings before you proceed with the Friendica update. This change will take some time depending on the size of your database.
Using Git
Updating from the git repositories should only involve a pull from the Friendica core repository and addons repository, regardless of the branch (stable or develop) you are using. Remember to update the dependencies with composer as well.
As many files got deleted or moved around, please upload the unpacked files to a new directory on your server (say friendica_new) and copy over your existing configuration (config/local.config.php and config/addon.config.php) and .htaccess files. Afterwards rename your current Friendica directory (e.g. friendica) to friendica_old and friendica_new to friendica.
The files of the dependencies are included in the archive (make sure you are using the friendica-full-2021.07 archive), so you don’t have to worry about them.
Post Update Tasks
The database update should be applied automatically, but sometimes it gets stuck. If you encounter this, please initiate the DB update manually from the command line by running the script
bin/console dbstructure update
from the base of your Friendica installation. If the output contains any error message, please let us know using the channels mentioned below.
Please note, that some of the changes to the database structure will take some time to be applied, depending on the size of your Friendica database.
Known Issues
Please note, that one of the dependencies of Friendica is currently incompatible with PHP 7.0. If you are still running that version of PHP, please have a look at this forum thread for a workaround.
How to Contribute
If you want to contribute to the project, you don’t need to have coding experience. There are a number of tasks listed in the issue tracker with the label “Junior Jobs” we think are good for new contributors. But you are by no means limited to these – if you find a solution to a problem (even a new one) please make a pull request at github or let us know in the development forum.
Contribution to Friendica is also not limited to coding. Any contribution to the documentation, the translation or advertisement materials is welcome or reporting a problem. You don’t need to deal with Git(Hub) or Transifex if you don’t like to. Just get in touch with us and we will get the materials to the appropriate places.
Thanks everyone who helped making this release possible and have fun!
Back to the schedule, we are glad to announce the availability of the initial release candidate of the Friendica 2021.06 release. During the past month. the focus of the work was on enhancing the Mastodon compatible API and adding support for RTL languages to the web interface as well as new addons to use SAML services like Keycloak for login.
If you want to help to hunt down rough edges and bugs ahead of the release in June, now is the perfect moment to switch from the stable or development branch to the freshly created 2021.06-rc branch. To do so please run
in the root directory of your Friendica and the addon directory. The command to update the dependencies (composer) is only necessary in the Friendica root directory.
Thanks for testing the new release! If you find any problems, please report them either at the issue tracker on github or in the support forum.
Please be aware the since the last stable release the database structure was changed, after the switch to the RC branch your server will need some time to perform these changes.
Known Problems
Please note, that one of the dependencies of Friendica is currently incompatible with PHP 7.0. If you are still running that version of PHP, please have a look at this forum thread for a workaround.
Should the DB update process get stuck
If you encounter this, please initiate the DB update manually from the command line by running the script
./bin/console dbstructure update
from the base of your Friendica installation. If the output contains any error message, please let us know using the channels mentioned above.
With a slight delay, we are happy to announce the availability of the new stable version of the Friendica communications server: Friendica Siberian Iris 2021.04.
This is mostly a bug fixing release, stabilizing the new features we introduced over the Red Hot Poker cycle, but also finishing some long time restructuring work on the database structure, which results in a greatly improved performance of Friendica. This release bundles 196 pull requests fixing 53 filed issues. For a detailed overview of the changes, please have a look at the CHANGELOG, some of the highlights
The reworking of how items are stored in the database was finished, which results in a great improvement of Friendicas performance. Please note that the needed upgrade might take hours depending of your database size.
Admins can now block tags from the trending tag widget.
We removed the Flash based addons from the addon repository.
And a heads up for developers, we moved some endpoints in the API to normalize the endpoints.
In that version we introduced views to the database and some node admins reported that they had to adjust their MariaDB configuration (table_definition_cache). Also setting pdo_emulate_prepares to true in the Friendica configuration might be necessary.
Pre-Update Procedures
Ensure that the last backup of your Friendica installation was done recently. Despite the long duration of the database upgrade we had no reports of unaddressed problems during the RC phase.
Please make sure to use Barracuda as MySQL DB file format for your Friendica database. Change your database settings before you proceed with the Friendica update. This change will take some time depending on the size of your database.
Using Git
Important: We removed the master branch and are using the stable branch instead.
Updating from the git repositories should only involve a pull from the Friendica core repository and addons repository, regardless of the branch (stable or develop) you are using. Remember to update the dependencies with composer as well.
As many files got deleted or moved around, please upload the unpacked files to a new directory on your server (say friendica_new) and copy over your existing configuration (config/local.config.php and config/addon.config.php) and .htaccess files. Afterwards rename your current Friendica directory (e.g. friendica) to friendica_old and friendica_new to friendica.
The files of the dependencies are included in the archive (make sure you are using the friendica-full-2021.01 archive), so you don’t have to worry about them.
Post Update Tasks
The database update should be applied automatically, but sometimes it gets stuck. If you encounter this, please initiate the DB update manually from the command line by running the script
bin/console dbstructure update
from the base of your Friendica installation. If the output contains any error message, please let us know using the channels mentioned below.
Please note, that some of the changes to the database structure will take some time to be applied, depending on the size of your Friendica database.
Known Issues
Please note, that one of the dependencies of Friendica is currently incompatible with PHP 7.0. If you are still running that version of PHP, please have a look at this forum thread for a workaround.
How to Contribute
If you want to contribute to the project, you don’t need to have coding experience. There are a number of tasks listed in the issue tracker with the label “Junior Jobs” we think are good for new contributors. But you are by no means limited to these – if you find a solution to a problem (even a new one) please make a pull request at github or let us know in the development forum.
Contribution to Friendica is also not limited to coding. Any contribution to the documentation, the translation or advertisement materials is welcome or reporting a problem. You don’t need to deal with Git(Hub) or Transifex if you don’t like to. Just get in touch with us and we will get the materials to the appropriate places.
Thanks everyone who helped making this release possible and have fun!
We are very happy to announce, that we’ve branched off the 2021.03 Release Candidate from the development branch. Doing so we are entering feature freeze for the upcoming stable release in March, only bug fixes and translation / documentation updates will flow into that branch. Some highlights for the upcoming 2021.03 release are:
The ongoing work to enhance the database structure has reached the point of replacement the old item table. This replacement will take a long time (hours), depending on the size of your installations number of stored items, but it is worth the speed gain.
CVE-2021-27329 was filed as ticket 9929External service interaction (HTTP & DNS) and has been fixed with PR 9935.
The frontend worker mechanism was removed entirely.
If you are using git to manage the code on your Friendica instance and want to test the upcoming release, helping us to smooth out some rough edges and squash some bugs you can do to by checking out the 2021.03-rc branch of the repository.
Thanks for testing the new release! If you find any problems, please report them either at the issue tracker on github or in the support forum.
Please be aware the since the last stable release the database structure was changed, after the switch to the RC branch your server will need some time (hours) to perform these changes.
Known Problems
Please note, that one of the dependencies of Friendica is currently incompatible with PHP 7.0. If you are still running that version of PHP, please have a look at this forum thread for a workaround.
Due hardening the OEmbed mechanism, embedding external resources may currently not be working as expected.
Should the DB update process get stuck
If you encounter this, please initiate the DB update manually from the command line by running the script
./bin/console dbstructure update
from the base of your Friendica installation. If the output contains any error message, please let us know using the channels mentioned above.
and a happy new year dear reader. Not quiet in time for the holidays, but we are very happy to announce the availability of the latest stable version of the Friendica communications server which bundles up some 270 pull requests closing 86 numbered issues. For a detailed overview of the changes, please have a look at the CHANGELOG, some of the highlights
Thanks to Balázs Úr Friendica is now available in Hungarian. The German, Italian and Russian translation was updated as well.
hansw-nlo made us aware of some places where user input was not properly escaped. For security reasons we urge you to upgrade to the new release. See Issue 9538 for details.
The performance of the background process was further improved. For nodes running on very limited hardware, this might cause some problems. If you are running Friendica on such hardware please be aware that you might need to adjust settings like the worker_cooldown in your configuration file.
Friendica is now able to directly re-share a posting in addition to the manual cite and re-share we are used to. Additionally the native re-sharing mechanisms of the different protocols supported by Friendica got improved and re-shared postings are now displayed on the users profile page.
In that version we introduced views to the database and some node admins reported that they had to adjust their MariaDB configuration (table_definition_cache). Also setting pdo_emulate_prepares to true in the Friendica configuration might be nessessary.
Pre-Update Procedures
Ensure that the last backup of your Friendica installation was done recently. We had no problems reported during the upgrade process from 2020.09 to the 2020.12 release candidate, so hopefully you will have a smooth transition.
Please make sure to use Barracuda as MySQL DB file format for your Friendica database. Change your database settings before you proceed with the Friendica update. This change will take some time depending on the size of your database.
Using Git
Important: We removed the master branch and are using the stable branch instead.
Updating from the git repositories should only involve a pull from the Friendica core repository and addons repository, regardless of the branch (stable or develop) you are using. Remember to update the dependencies with composer as well.
Pulling in the dependencies with composer will show some deprecation warning, we will be working on that in the upcoming release. If you want to use the current development version of Friendica instead of the stable released version, you can checkout develop instead, but be aware that the develop branch might be unstable and buggy.
As many files got deleted or moved around, please upload the unpacked files to a new directory on your server (say friendica_new) and copy over your existing configuration (config/local.config.php and config/addon.config.php) and .htaccess files. Afterwards rename your current Friendica directory (e.g. friendica) to friendica_old and friendica_new to friendica.
The files of the dependencies are included in the archive (make sure you are using the friendica-full-2021.01 archive), so you don’t have to worry about them.
Post Update Tasks
The database update should be applied automatically, but sometimes it gets stuck. If you encounter this, please initiate the DB update manually from the command line by running the script
bin/console dbstructure update
from the base of your Friendica installation. If the output contains any error message, please let us know using the channels mentioned below.
Please note, that some of the changes to the database structure will take some time to be applied, depending on the size of your Friendica database.
Known Issues
Please note, that one of the dependencies of Friendica is currently incompatible with PHP 7.0. If you are still running that version of PHP, please have a look at this forum thread for a workaround.
Some admins had problems during the upgrade of the database structure. See e.g. this issue on github about it.
How to Contribute
If you want to contribute to the project, you don’t need to have coding experience. There are a number of tasks listed in the issue tracker with the label “Junior Jobs” we think are good for new contributors. But you are by no means limited to these – if you find a solution to a problem (even a new one) please make a pull request at github or let us know in the development forum.
Contribution to Friendica is also not limited to coding. Any contribution to the documentation, the translation or advertisement materials is welcome or reporting a problem. You don’t need to deal with Git(Hub) or Transifex if you don’t like to. Just get in touch with us and we will get the materials to the appropriate places.
Thanks everyone who helped making this release possible and have fun!
The year is slowly nearing its end and as part of the holiday season preparations we are wrapping up the Friendica 2020.12 release. As part of this, we are very happy to announce the availability of the Release Candid branch of Friendica 2020.12 and hope that some of you will join the process of hunting down rough edges and problems with the release, before the new stable version is published later this month.
If you want to help, now is the perfect moment to switch from the stable or development branch to the freshly created 2020.12-rc branch. To do so please run
in the root directory of your Friendica and the addon directory. The command to update the dependencies (composer) is only necessary in the Friendica root directory.
Thanks for testing the new release! If you find any problems, please report them either at the issue tracker on github or in the support forum.
Please be aware the since the last stable release the database structure was changed, after the switch to the RC branch your server will need some time (hours) to perform these changes.
Known Problems
Please note, that one of the dependencies of Friendica is currently incompatible with PHP 7.0. If you are still running that version of PHP, please have a look at this forum thread for a workaround.
Should the DB update process get stuck
If you encounter this, please initiate the DB update manually from the command line by running the script
./bin/console dbstructure update
from the base of your Friendica installation. If the output contains any error message, please let us know using the channels mentioned above.