Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Security fixes for Review Board

Review Board 1.7.12 and 1.6.18 have been released addressing several security issues including an XSS vulnerability. For details about all the fixes included in these releases please check the official releases notes.

If you are already using BitNami Review Board, check our documentation for upgrading it. It is recommended that you upgrade your installation to include the latest security fixes.
 

Our installers, virtual machine and cloud images for BitNami Review Board have been already updated. We will also be removing older versions of Review Board from Amazon, Azure and other repositories, to prevent end users from inadvertently launching insecure versions of this application.






Monday, July 29, 2013

Dolibarr ERP & CRM now available in BitNami

We are happy to announce that Dolibarr ERP & CRM is now available as part of the BitNami library. Dolibarr is an open source, free software Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) package for small and medium companies, foundations and freelancers.

BitNami makes it easy to install and manage Dolibarr by bundling the application with all of its required dependencies (web server, database, and so on) in an easy to deploy package. 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.

If you want to check out this new version, you can instantly launch a free cloud demo server with the BitNami Cloud Launchpad by clicking the button below.


Laurent Destailleur, project leader and main developer of Dolibarr, was kind enough to share with us some details about the project.

1. What is the goal of the Dolibarr application?

The goal of Dolibarr ERP & CRM is to provide an integrated and free software package that provides all features you need to manage your company or foundation.

Dolibarr dashboard


2. What are some of the features of Dolibarr?

Dolibarr provides everything you would expect from a modern ERP and CRM system including:

  • Customers, prospects and suppliers directory
  • Products and services catalog
  • Stock management
  • Bank accounts management
  • Commercial actions management
  • Orders management
  • and dozens of other features

Dolibarr can also be extended via external modules available on DoliStore.com

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

In France alone, over 100 000 small companies and associations/foundations are using Dolibarr.

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

Dolibarr target audience are people at small companies without necessarily much technical knowledge. Having BitNami packages available will address the need of such users: being able to install Dolibarr, a powerful software package, in few seconds by themselves. Also, though there are already competitors that provide packaged installs for Dolibarr, none provide a package for Mac OS X yet. BitNami makes it easier for those users to get started with Dolibarr.

We are glad Dolibarr 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!

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

New GitLab 5.4 with major improvements

We are excited to announce we have released a GitLab 5.4.0 stack in BitNami, which provides a one-click install solution for GitLab and all of its required software. This version ships GitLab 3.0, the latest version of GitLab Continuous Integration tool, which provides a flexible architecture for both distributed and isolated builds.

GitLab and GitLab CI have been designed to work together. GitLab allows you to manage your Git repositories easily: create projects, control access and perform code reviews. GitLab CI allows you run build tasks and tests for any branch.

If you want to check this new version, you can instantly launch a free cloud demo server with the BitNami Cloud Launchpad by clicking the button below.



This version of Gitlab CI now consists of two components: the coordinator and its runners.

The coordinator or main application provides a status and management interface for your builds and manages the build queues for all projects.

The runners are processes that ask its coordinator for build jobs to perform. These runners could be running in any machine. BitNami GitLab configures one runner in your server by default but you can add more as needed.

Runner associated to the project

The GitLab project integration inside GitLab CI is easier than ever, as you can see in a quick start guide we created here.

GitLab project integration

As with all BitNami stacks, you can download a free Linux native installer, a virtual machine or deploy GitLab to the Amazon EC2 or Windows Azure clouds.

Monday, July 22, 2013

Azure Cloud Launchpad: Get Free Demo Servers of Your Favorite Open Source Apps on Windows Azure

We are happy to announce the release of the BitNami Cloud Launchpad for Windows Azure, which provides one-click test-drive deployments of BitNami applications in the Azure Cloud.

Making open source web applications easier to install and manage is our singular focus at BitNami. This includes simplifying the way applications are deployed on all major Cloud platforms. Earlier this year, we announced BitNami support for Windows Azure. We have been pleasantly surprised by the performance and capabilities of the Azure Cloud, in particular its support for Linux and Open Source and its willingness to compete head to head with Amazon on pricing. We will be integrating even more deeply with it in the upcoming months. The BitNami Cloud Launchpad for Windows Azure is a first step in that direction.

With just one click, you will be able to launch most applications that are part of BitNami, including WordPress, Drupal, Joomla!, Redmine and dozens of others, in the cloud. Your demo server will run for one hour, so you have time to check out the app, before automatically shutting down.  Of course, you can also launch the app on your own Windows Azure account (click on the "See in VMDepot" button next to the app) to keep it running on an ongoing basis.

Getting started with the Launchpad is as easy as going to http://bitnami.com/azure, selecting the app you want to check out and clicking the "Launch" button. 


We will spin up a new server on Azure and start the process of installing and configuring the application for you.

Just a few minutes later, you will receive a notification email and be able to start using the application!



While your demo server will only run for one hour, you can repeat this process with different applications. Once you are ready to run production applications, you can sign up for Windows Azure and launch BitNami images directly from your own account.

BitNami will be present at OSCON this week. If you are attending, pass by our booth to say hello and check out BitNami apps running on Windows Azure.

Thursday, July 18, 2013

PHP 5.3 security issue

PHP security issue that affects older versions of PHP was recently announced. We have released updated versions of the BitNami legacy PHP development stacks: LAMP, MAMP, WAMP and LAPP, MAPPWAPP with PHP 5.3.27.

All our PHP application stacks (like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla! among others) use the latest stable version of PHP 5.4 currently, so it is not necessary to upgrade those.

The BitNami Red Hat-based Amazon Cloud Images were also affected by this issue. We have removed older versions of BitNami apps published on the Amazon Cloud catalog and marketplace that may be vulnerable to this security issue. We continue working on releasing all new Red Hat images for all BitNami applications.

If you are using a Red Hat BitNami cloud image, the new PHP version is available in the Red Hat repositories:

$ sudo yum update

That will update your system and upgrade your current PHP installation to the one that includes the security fix.

Thursday, July 11, 2013

New Discourse version with speed improvements

We are happy to announce that a we have released a new Discourse version. You can download the free native installer for Linux or OS X or virtual machine or deploy Discourse to the Amazon EC2 or Windows Azure cloud.

In case you are not familiar with the Discourse project, it is an open source next-generation discussion platform with one goal in mind: to support a broader discussion without falling victim to the trolling and spam that afflicts many other forums and comment threads.

If you want to check this new version, you can launch a free cloud demo server with the BitNami Cloud Launchpad by clicking the button below.

Thanks to the suggestions of the Discourse community, we have been working on new improvements for the BitNami Discourse installations.

We are now enabling logrotate by default. If your community grows, server log files will also grow and you will need a way to periodically store and compress them to save space. We configured logrotate for all servers that Discourse requires: Apache, PostgreSQL, Redis, Sidekiq and Clockwork. The default logrotate configuration files are installed in the "config/logrotate" folder and logs are rotated weekly by default.

BitNami Discourse is even faster with the new bundled PageSpeed module. This module automatically applies web performance best practices to pages, and associated assets (CSS, JavaScript, images) without requiring that you modify your application. It is a great way to improve the performance without spending a lot of time investigating or optimizing the code.

Using PageSpeed, the first request to a sample Discourse welcome page has been reduced from 1,265KB to 344KB and the load time has been also reduced significantly from the previous version, around 30% in our tests.

More docs. We have documented how to configure Discourse with the Mandrill email service. Depending on the size of your community, Discourse may need send a lot of emails. We typically suggest using a GMail account during testing because it is more convenient, but if you are running a production server, it is better to use a third party service like Mandrill.

The Discourse team is working hard and continues to improve the application daily. We have prepared some documentation in our Wiki on how to maintain your installation up-to-date.

Discourse forum

We will continue releasing new versions of other BitNami stacks with similar improvements. stay tuned!

Artifactory: Binary repository manager now part of BitNami

Artifactory
We are happy to announce that Artifactory is now available as part of the the BitNami library. Artifactory is a binary repository manager for Maven, Ivy and Gradle modules among others. This solution is already used by a large number of popular open source projects and is now available in BitNami as native installers for  Windows, OS X and Linux, virtual machines and Azure and Amazon EC2 cloud images.


Baruch Sadogursky, Developer Advocate at JFrog, the company behind Artifactory, tells us more about this project.


What is the goal of the Artifactory application?
Artifactory is a Binary Repository. It is intended to solve all the binary storage-related needs in an organization, being it organizational Maven/Gradle proxies, in-house YUM repositories, NuGet galleries, Ruby Gems hosting, or an operations department repository with VM images.

What are some of the features of Artifactory?
The most prominent features of Artifactory are the smart checksum once-and-only-once content storage, exceptional integration with all the most popular build tools and CI servers, the schema-less binaries metadata and the automation features, like REST-API and user plugins.

Which projects or organizations are using Artifactory currently?  What kind of projects do they use it for?
We have several hundred thousands of open source users and thousands of paying customers. More and more are joining every day. The usage varies from simple Maven proxies to very complicated enterprise-wide cross-continent setups with sophisticated promotion scenarios. You can find some of our paying customers listed on this page. Large and popular open source projects, like SpringSource, Jenkins, Grails, Gradle, Typesafe etc. are releasing and distributing their software from the Artifactory cloud servers.

What do you expect will be the main benefits of having BitNami packages available for Artifactory?
Having native installers for hosted servers are indeed a powerful enabler, but having cloud installers in our cloud-oriented world is priceless. Thanks for the cloud installers, we expect even more adoption of Artifactory.




Artifactory Repository Browser


Of course, the best way of getting an idea of what Artifactory has to offer is to take a look at it yourself. Launch a free cloud demo server with the BitNami Cloud Launchpad by clicking the launch button below. 



If you are interested in having your own Artifactory server running you can get any of our free, ready to run deployment offers: native installers for  Windows, OS X and Linux, virtual machines and Azure and Amazon EC2 cloud images.