Roundcube now available in BitNami

Roundcube was the latest winner of the BitNami bi-weekly packaging contest and we are happy to announce that it is already available as part of the BitNami library.

You can now download free, ready to run native installers for Windows, OS X and Linux, virtual machines and Azure and Amazon EC2 images for Roundcube.

For those of you not familiar with this popular app, Roundcube is a modern webmail solution for managing your emails, similar to GMail, that you can host on your own servers. Some of its features include MIME support, address book, folder manipulation, message searching and spell checking.

You can also now launch a free cloud demo server with the BitNami Cloud Launchpad by clicking the launch button below. This server was configured with GMail by default. You can log in with a GMail account to start using it.

Thomas Bruederli, the Lead Developer and Project Administrator of Roundcube, was kind enough to answer some questions about his project.


1. What is the goal of the Roundcube application?

Roundcube aims to be a state-of-the-art webmail application that can be put on top of every standard email server and which is free to use and can easily be extended.

2. What are some of the features of Roundcube?

As the name states, the core features are everyday email reading and writing. For the use in corporate or institutional environments, Roundcube also integrates LDAP address books. Thanks to the plugin architecture one can choose from a broad variety of plugins that add further features such as calendar, task management, message filters or synchronization.

3. Which projects or organizations are using Roundcube currently?  What kind of projects do they use it for?

There are several American Universities using Roundcube for their campus or department email service, the largest deployment known is at University of Michigan serving 70K users. But also many internet service providers around the world meanwhile offer Roundcube by default for their paying hosting customers. Finally, Roundcube became the web client of the open source groupware solution Kolab which is a powerful competitor in the groupware market.

4. What do you expect will be the main benefits of having BitNami packages available for Roundcube?

Although the installation of Roundcube is rather simple, having it packaged and pre-configured will hopefully make it even easier for people to give it a try. Since the Roundcube software is still pretty young and under heavy development, we also expect to open a proper update channel with the BitNami packages.


Would you like your favorite app to be part of BitNami? Be sure to suggest and vote for it in our contest!

Security fix for Ruby 1.9 applications

A new Ruby version was released recently to address a security issue.  There is a vulnerability in DL and Fiddle in Ruby where tainted strings can be used by system calls regardless of the $SAFE level set in Ruby.

We want to let BitNami users know that most popular Rails-based application installers, virtual machines and cloud images have been already updated and released to include a fixed Ruby version. We continue working on upgrading all of them for all platforms.

Ruby stack, Redmine, GitLab, Discourse, Tracks and Spree with Ruby version 1.9.3-p429 have been already released.

We have also taken this chance to upgrade several core components to their latest version, which we were already were in the process of releasing:

• Apache version 2.4.4
• Passenger version 4.0.2 
• phpMyAdmin version 4.0.0
• Perl version 5.16.3
• Mod_perl version 2.0.8 for Apache 2.4.4

We updated Ruby-based stacks for Linux and OS X platforms. We will update the Windows-based stacks soon. If you already have installed a version of these applications please make sure that you update your environment or apply the appropriate patch.

Django in the Mac App Store with BitNami

The Mac App Store is the simplest way to find and download apps for your Mac. BitNami Stacks provide a great way to deploy web applications and development frameworks. Django is a popular Python-based web development framework. What do you get when you combine these three items? ... Exactly! We are happy to announce that the latest version of BitNami Django Stack is now available in the Mac OS X App Store.

BitNami Django Stack provides a complete, self-contained Django development environment and greatly simplifies getting started with the development and deployment of Django applications. It includes ready-to-run versions of Apache 2.2.23, MySQL 5.5.28, SQLite 3.7.10, Python 2.7.3 and Django 1.5 and all the required dependencies.

The graphical tool included in the stack allows you to easily open the BitNami environment, manage the servers and  access the log files.

You can find more details in our documentation for BitNami Stack for Django in our Mac App Store section.







If you enjoy Django Stack, please help us spread the word by taking the time to rate the app and add a comment, we would really appreciate it.


If you run into any issues, or have any questions or suggestions, please let us know.

Deploy GitLab & GitLab CI in the cloud with BitNami

The GitLab CI application won recently the BitNami bi-weekly packaging contest. Our users chose it to be added to the BitNami library, just as with GitLab previously. GitLab CI is an open-source continuous integration server, closely integrated with GitLab.

As GitLab and GitLab CI have been designed to work together, we have decided to package both in the same GitLab BitNami stack. By launching a recent BitNami GitLab cloud image, (later than version 5.1.0-3), you will have access to both GitLab and GitLab CI. GitLab will be accessible at "/gitlab" and GitLab CI at "/gitlabci"

You can find below a step by step guide on how to perform full integration between them for a sample project. This integration consists on the ability of running a task from GitLab CI when an user makes a commit in a GitLab repository. To achieve that, please perform the following steps:

1. Add a project on GitLab.

Commiting on GitLab

2. Create a ssh key for the gitlab_ci user in this machine without a password. This key will allow GitLab CI to have read access to chosen repositories:

sudo su gitlab_ci -c "ssh-keygen -t rsa"

3. Add this key as "Deploy Keys" on the GitLab project. On GitLab, go to Projects -> BitNami sample project -> Settings -> Deploy Keys -> Add deploy key and paste the key generated previously and save it with any name you want.

4. On your personal machine start the repository as is described at GitLab. This step is not related to the integration with GitLab CI but the repository should be started to be able to perform the remaining steps.

5. Clone the repository with the gitlab_ci user on the GitLab server.

$ sudo su gitlab_ci
$ mkdir /opt/bitnami/apps/gitlabci/repositories
$ /opt/bitnami/git/bin/git config --global user.name 'Administrator'
$ /opt/bitnami/git/bin/git config --global user.email 'user@example.com'
$ cd /opt/bitnami/apps/gitlabci/repositories/
$ /opt/bitnami/git/bin/git clone git@<hostname_gitlab_server>:bitnami-sample-project.git"
Cloning into 'bitnami-sample-project'...

remote: Counting objects: 3, done.

Receiving objects: 100% (3/3), 201 bytes, done. remote: Total 3 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)

6. Create the project on GitLab CI by selecting 'Add project' on the GitLab CI application with the following parameters and saving it.

 - Name: bitnami-sample-project
 - Token: (blank)
 - Path: /opt/bitnami/apps/gitlabci/repositories/bitnami-sample-project
 - Follow branches: master
 - Scripts: ls

Once created, press "Details" because the "Project URL" and "Project Token" are required for the next step.

7. Enable GitLab CI on the repository created on GitLab. To do so, go to GitLab -> Projects -> BitNami sample project -> Settings -> Services -> GitLab CI. Select "Active" and fill "Project URL" and "Project Token" with the values from the previous step and press Save.

8. GitLab integration with GitLab CI is complete! To test it is working, just commit a new file from your personal machine. Then on GitLab CI you should be able to see something similar to the following:

GitLab CI running tasks when commiting on GitLab

BitNami Gitlab Stack provides a one-click install solution for GitLab. Download installers and virtual machines or run your own GitLab server in the cloud.

Faster, Leaner BitNami Stacks

Tens of thousands of people come to BitNami daily to download and launch their favorite applications and development environments. Our stacks include all the software required to work out of the box. This is convenient, but also means that stacks are bigger (our servers routinely deliver Terabytes of data) and take longer to install.  We are continuously investigating how to optimize and improve our stacks. We recently released Ruby-based stacks with important performance enhancements and today we want to announce that we have significantly improved the size and installation time of all of the BitNami stacks:

- Download size has been reduced up to 25%
- Installation time has been reduced up to 20%

The table below provides some examples demonstrating the improvements for specific stacks:

Honey, I shrunk BitNami!

BitNami Stack	Platform	Old Size (Bytes)	New Size (Bytes)	Reduced size (%)
Discourse	Linux	154093361	130738191	15%
Discourse	Linux 64bit	159344381	134155668	16%
Discourse	OSX	201518444	168480703	16%
Ruby stack	Linux	151606058	114763947	24%
Ruby stack	Linux 64bit	156942471	118022171	25%
Ruby stack	OSX	169405779	129635012	23%
Ruby stack	Windows	193101521	136704171	29%
Jenkins	Linux	191424884	143244029	25%
Jenkins	Linux-x86_64	187323355	140998975	25%
Jenkins	OSX	192062870	144819619	25%
Jenkins	Windows	211078764	145728200	31%

The table below shows the improvement in unpacking files time for different released stacks:

BitNami Stack	Platform	Old Time (secs)	New Time (secs)	Time reduction (%)
Discourse	Linux	86.26	72.49	16%
Ruby stack	Linux	86.17	69.62	19%
Ruby stack	Windows	92.92	70.33	24%
Jenkins	Linux	45.00	38.84	14%
Jenkins	Windows	55.37	44.08	20%

Over the next few weeks we will update all stacks to include the speed and size improvements. Some of the stacks that already include these optimizations are Redmine, Discourse, GitLab, Ruby stack, LAMP, MAMP, WAMP among others.

RoundCube: The Latest BitNami Contest Winner

Congrats to the RoundCube team! The RoudCube application is the new winner of the bi-weekly packaging contest. It has been chosen by our users to be added to the BitNami library.

RoundCube is like having your own private GMail: a browser-based multilingual IMAP client with an application-like user interface. It provides full functionality you expect from an e-mail client, including MIME support, address book, folder manipulation, message searching and spell checking.

RoundCube Webmail

As with all BitNami apps, we will provide free RoundCube installers, virtual machines and cloud images for the Amazon and Windows Azure clouds. 

Thanks to the community votes, we also recently released Horde Groupware Webmail in BitNami. Horde is a browser-based communication suite, where users can read, send and organize email messages and manage and share calendars, contacts, tasks and notes. If you are interested in a Webmail platform you can try Horde easily downloading the Horde Groupware Webmail installers, virtual machines or you can instantly launch a free cloud demo server.

Would you like to have your favorite app as part of BitNami? Make sure to suggest and vote for it in our contest!

BitNami Contest Update

A month ago GitLab, a free project and repository management application, was added to the BitNami Library after winning our bi-weekly contest. Last week the application chosen by our users was GitLab CI, an open-source continuous integration server closely integrated with GitLab. We are already working on it and we will soon provide you with free installers, VMs and cloud images for Amazon and Windows Azure. Congratulations to the GitLab team!

In this current contest round, which will be running until next Monday, several interesting projects are up for potential BitNami packaging. Currently, the top apps are:

 RoundCube: "I'm a super-cool webmail!" is how RoundCube describes itself be in their Twitter account. It is a PHP based multilingual IMAP client with an application-like user interface. 

 OpenScholar: Built on the open-source framework Drupal, OpenScholar makes it possible to create academic web sites in a matter of seconds. Harvard University, University of California, Princeton University, State University of New York, University of California and more are already using it.

 Octopress: A blogging framework for hackers. You manage your site’s content from a git repository. Octopress is a framework designed by Brandon Mathis for Jekyll. 



If you would like one of the above to win, be sure to vote for it! You can also vote for other projects or nominate new ones not yet on our list. Don't forget to ask others to vote for your favorite project to increase its chances of winning!

Horde Groupware Webmail now part of BitNami

We are pleased to announce that Horde Groupware Webmail is now available on BitNami! Horde is an open source, enterprise-ready, browser-based communication suite. Users can read, send and organize email messages and manage and share calendars, contacts, tasks and notes with the standards compliant components from the Horde Project.

You can now download free, ready to run native installers for OS X and Linux, an Ubuntu-based virtual machine and Azure and Amazon EC2 cloud images.

You can also now launch a free cloud demo server with the BitNami Cloud Launchpad by clicking the launch button below.

Jan Scheneider, core developer and a founding member of Horde LLC was kind enough to answer some questions for those of you who may not be familiar with the project.

1. What is the goal of the Horde Groupware Webmail application? 

We aim to provide the most flexible web based Groupware available. The strong points and the focus of Horde Groupware are: flexible integration with existing infrastructure, extensive configuration and customization options, strong support for standards.

Horde Groupware Webmail Edition dashboard

2.- What are the main features of Horde Groupware Webmail?


Some of the features of Horde Groupware include:

    Dynamic, basic and mobile interfaces
    Public and shared resources (calendars, address books, tasklists and notepads)
    Translated into 41 languages including right-to-left scripts and full unicode support
    Global tagging sytem
    Customizable portal screen including applets for weather, quotes, etc.
    Import and export of groupware data from other applications
    Synchronization with PDAs, mobile phones, groupware clients
    Strong integration, e.g. address book lookups in meeting planning, task due dates in calendar
    IMAP and POP3 webmail client
    Message filtering
    Message searching
    HTML message composition with WYSIWIG editor
    Quota support
    Keyboard navigation

You can check the main Horde Groupware Webmail features at http://www.horde.org/apps/webmail and http://www.horde.org/apps/groupware

3. Which projects or organizations are using Horde Groupware Webmail currently?

Horde is especially strong in academic and hoster environments. You can find important companies and organizations at the Horde's deployments page like SAPO Mail (Portuguese ISP), Versatel.nl, University of Michigan, Columbia University and more.

4. What are the benefits for Horde Groupware Webmail to be available as BitNami stack installers, virtual machine and Azure & Amazon cloud images?

BitNami stacks make it easier for new users to get started with Horde Groupware Webmail. It also simplifies to test new versions or run the application in the cloud easily.


We are glad Horde Groupware Webmail is now part of BitNami. Would you like your favorite app to be part of BitNami? Make sure to suggest and vote for it in our contest!

Performance enhancements for Ruby-based stacks in BitNami

We have been steadily working on releasing new applications for our BitNami Library. We have also been investigating new configurations and optimizations to improve the performance of existing ones.

As part of this work we have just released new versions of Ruby Stack, Discourse, Redmine or GitLab with several performance improvements, detailed below:

We added the popular Falcon patches by default, which also include the Greg Price's patch for speedup. These fixes significantly reduce application startup time for Rails-based apps.

To test this improvement, we tested Discourse in an Ubuntu 64 bit small instance in Amazon EC2:

$ time -p bin/rake environment RAILS_ENV=production

Ruby 1.9.3-p392:  69.60 secs
Ruby 1.0.3-p392 + Falcon patches: 22.47 secs

We are also adding specific settings for improving per-application performance. Discourse developers have noticed slowdowns related to Garbage Collection. We configured the BitNami Discourse stack to increase the GC limit to 90 MBs.

We have released a new version of Ruby for Windows that ships similar performance patches. The Code Shop group already implemented these patches for Windows and using this new Ruby version, Redmine starts almost 30% faster for this platform.

In addition to that, we updated the Bundler gem to the latest 3.1.5 version for all the Ruby-based stacks, which is much faster than the previous versions. Now you can run "bundle update" in a few seconds.

If you have additional suggestions on how we can improve the performance of BitNami apps, please let us know!

OXID eShop now available in BitNami

We are happy to announce that OXID eShop is now available on BitNami library. OXID eShop is a flexible open source e-commerce software with a wide range of functionalities. Thanks to its modular, modern and state-of-the-art architecture, it can be modified, expanded and customized to individual requirements with the greatest of ease.

You can now download free, ready to run native installers for  Windows, OS X and Linux, virtual machines and Azure and Amazon EC2 cloud images.

You can now launch a free cloud demo server with the BitNami Cloud Launchpad by clicking the launch button below.

Marco Steinhäeuser, Community Guide at OXID eSales AG, has replied some questions about the OXID sShop project.

What is the goal of the OXID eShop application?

With OXID eShop, online merchants or integration agencies get a lean, modern and feature rich PHP software to build up a sustainable e-commerce business. OXID eShop is easy to customize: it uses the Smarty template engine for generating one's unique store front design. If you have to change or add some functionality for fitting OXID eShop into your business model, write an extension, put it into the modules folder and off you go. Thanks to the OOP (object oriented programming) architecture you'll be able to update your software and benefit from the latest innovations without loosing your changes.

Because OXID eShop is so simple to adapt there will be a short time to market -  OXID eShop is just e-commerce software for agencies with deadlines :-)

OXID eShop sample project

What are the main features of OXID eShop?

- High performance

- Scalability

- Good usability

- SEO friendliness (including rich snippets)

- B2B and B2C capability

- multilingual/multiple currencies

- Downloadable and virtual products 

- Integrated web2.0 components

- Private shopping

- Multi stores (only capable in Enterprise Edition)

Which projects or organizations are using OXID eShop currently?

By nature, usually merchants, online pure players as well as multichannel providers but also more and more manufacturer and vendors. We have very small mom-and-dad-shops as well as really huge players and everything between. Here's an extract of our bigger references:

Mercedes Benz Parts http://www.mbgtc.de/

Hellweg hardware store http://www.hellweg.de/

Schiesser http://www.schiesser.com/

German Post https://www.postofficeshop.de/

Mayersche book store http://www.mayersche.de/

Gravis Mac store http://www.gravis.de/

ADAC http://www.adac-shop.de/

Haribo https://onlineshop.haribo.com/

Reisenthel http://www.reisenthel.com

Carrera toys https://shop.carrera-toys.com

Carl Zeiss Jena https://taster.zeiss.de/

What are the benefits for OXID eShop to be available as BitNami stack installers, virtual machine and Amazon cloud images? 

Thanks to BitNami it is now possible for integrators, freelancers and ambitioned online merchants to easily get started, running their own development environment, building up staging machines and to test their modifications instead of working on their productive servers. This is very useful for module coders as well, as they can test extensions in different versions of OXID eShop. The most cool thing is that one can choose the environment by taste, no matter if preferring the Amazon cloud, a virtual machine or a LAMP, MAMP or WAMP stack.

We'd like to thank BitNami in the name of the whole community for the useful stacks!

We are glad OXID eShop is now part of BitNami. Would you like your favorite app to be part of BitNami? Make sure to suggest and vote for it in our contest!

New BitNami Development Stacks with PHP 5.4.14 released

We are happy to announce that all of the BitNami PHP-based development stacks have been updated to include PHP 5.4.14, Apache 2.4.4, MySQL 5.5.30 and PostgreSQL 9.2.4 support. BitNami stacks provide pre-configured, ready to run bundles for your favorite server applications and development environments.

You can download LAMP stack for Linux, MAMP stack for OS X and WAMP stack for Windows to develop PHP-based applications on your Desktop, using your favorite Operating System. There are also Ubuntu-based virtual machines available for download and cloud images to deploy on Azure or Amazon EC2 directly.

We also upgraded the PostgreSQL based stacks to the the latest stable version, PostgreSQL 9.2.4, that fixes a security vulnerability. You can download LAPP, MAPP and WAPP stacks as native installers, virtual machine images and cloud images for Azure and Amazon EC2.


If you develop with both databases MySQL and PostgreSQL, you can also install the PostgreSQL module on top of your current LAMP, WAMP or MAMP stack.

LAMP stack manager tool running on Linux

LAMP virtual machine

New BitNami Contest winner: Horde Groupware Webmail Edition

Horde Groupware Webmail just won our last bi-weekly contest and we are already working on adding it to the BitNami Library. Installers for Linux, OS X and Windows, virtual machines and cloud images for both Windows Azure and AWS cloud will be available soon.

Horde Groupware Webmail Edition is a free, enterprise ready, browser based communication suite. Users can read, send and organize email messages and manage and share calendars, contacts, tasks and notes with the standards compliant components from the Horde Project.

Now our bi-weekly contest has been reset and you have two weeks for voting or suggesting other projects. Don't forget to ask others to vote for your favorite project to win!

XOOPS now available in BitNami

XOOPS is a new winner of the BitNami bi-weekly packaging contest. XOOPS is an acronym of eXtensible Object Oriented Portal System, it is an easy to use dynamic web content management system written in PHP. Its object orientation makes it an ideal tool for developing small or large community websites, intra company and corporate portals, weblogs and much more. 

You can now download free, ready to run native installers for  Windows, OS X and Linux, virtual machines and Azure & Amazon EC2 cloud images for XOOPS.

You can now launch a free cloud demo server with the BitNami Cloud Launchpad by clicking the launch button below.

Michael Beck from the XOOPS project, was kind enough to answer some questions for those of you who may not be familiar with the project.

1. What is the goal of the XOOPS application?

XOOPS is one of world's leading open source CMS and portal systems, written in PHP for the MySQL database. Its object orientation makes it an ideal tool for developing small or large community websites, intra company and corporate portals, weblogs and much more.

 

Founded in 2001 by group of international software developers, XOOPS quickly become one of world's leading Open Source Content Management Systems (CMS).  

 

Known and loved for its ease of use and countless powerful modules, XOOPS received numerous International Awards and Recognitions, including being the Top 5 finalist of the 2008, 2009, and 2010 CMS Awards by Packt Publishing. In January 2009 it received the 2008 China Open Source Software Contest Award and in October 2010 the "Best Technology Award" from Northeast Asia OSS Forum. In 2012 it was voted as People's Choice 1st Runner Up as Best Free CMS, and in 2013 SourceForge selected XOOPS to be included in their directory of "Enterprise-ready Open Source Projects".

2. What are some of the features of XOOPS?

- Database-driven: XOOPS uses a relational database (currently MySQL) to store data required
for running a web-based content management system.
- Fully Modularized: Modules can be installed/uninstalled/ativated/deactivated with a click using the XOOPS module administration system.
- Personalization: Registered users can edit their profiles, select site themes, upload custom avatars, and much more.
- User Management: The ability to search for users by various criteria, send email and private messages to users through a template-based messaging system.
- Supported World-wide: XOOPS was created and is maintained by a team of several hard-working volunteers working from all over the world. The XOOPS community has more than dozen official support sites around the world for support of non-English speaking users.
- Multi-byte Language Support: Fully supports multi-byte languages, including Japanese, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Korean, etc.
- Versatile Group Permissions System: Powerful and user-friendly permissions system which enables administrators to set permissions by group.
- Theme-based skinnable interface: XOOPS is driven by a powerful theme system. Both admins and users can change the look of the entire web site with just a click of a mouse. There are also over 1000 themes available for download!

XOOPS administration panel

3. Which projects or organizations are using XOOPS currently?  What kind of projects do they use it for?

Some of the more prolific users include: 

- Libyan Ministry of Defense (http://www.defense.gov.ly/)
- Libyan National Election Commission (http://www.hnec.ly/)
- Brazilian equivalent of our CIA (http://www.abin.gov.br/)
- All government Website of State of Parana in Brazil are built with XOOPS:  http://www.parana.pr.gov.br/ and http://www.turismo.pr.gov.br
- ComputerWorld in Denmark (www.computerworld.dk)
- Centos (http://www.centos.org)
- Koreus in France (www.koreus.com)
- Goldseiten in Germany (www.goldseiten.de)

4. What do you expect will be the main benefits of having BitNami packages available for XOOPS?

The main benefit for XOOPS of being in BitNami distribution will be increased number of choices for users to install XOOPS, and making it easier for them, as they will be able to install XOOPS with one click on various platforms, incl. Windows, OS X, and Linux.  

We are glad XOOPS is now part of BitNami. Would you like your favorite app to be part of BitNami? Make sure to suggest and vote for it in our contest!

Updated Amazon Linux Servers in BitNami Cloud Hosting

BitNami Cloud Hosting makes it easy to install and run Drupal, Joomla!, Wordpress and dozens of other popular open source applications. In addition to facilitating the initial install, it provides automatic monitoring of your servers, one-click backup and restore and server scheduling.

When creating a server you have several configurations options at the Cloud, server and application level. Today we want to announce that we have added support for the latest version of Amazon Linux , recently released.

Amazon Linux is supported as one of the native stack options. The native stack images do not include BitNami components for the server components. Instead, we use the Red Hat and Amazon Linux native stacks (Apache web server, PHP, MySQL database etc.), and install BitNami web applications on top of it. This allows you to use the operating system tools to keep the stack components up to date and enables you to maintain consistency across your pre-existing environments.

For details about the new Amazon Linux images, please take a look at the release notes.