Thursday, September 26, 2013

Ruby 2.1.0 preview1 now available in BitNami


The release of Ruby 2.1.0 is planned for December 25th. The Ruby team has released Ruby 2.1.0preview1, the first cut of this upcoming version. If you are curious about this release and how it may affect your projects, we just made this task really easy for you! We are happy to share that we have just released BitNami Ruby Stack with Ruby 2.1.0preview1. It is completely self-contained and will not conflict with your current development environment. You can download it, give it a try and safely remove it when you are done.

The main changes in the new Ruby 2.1.0preview1 are:

    - VM (method cache)

- RGenGC (See ko1’s RubyKaigi presentation and Euruko presentation)
- refinements
    - syntax
    - Decimal Literal
    - Frozen String Literal
    - def’s return value
    - Bignum
    - 128bit support
    - GMP
    - String#scrub
    - Socket.getifaddrs
    - new RubyGems

This version includes new features and improvements but it has a few compatibility issues as well. You can find a list of changes in the Ruby repository.

If you are not familiar with BitNami Ruby Stack, it is a free package that simplifies the development and deployment of Ruby on Rails applications. This version includes ready-to-run versions of Apache 2.4.6, MySQL 5.5.32, Ruby 2.1.0preview1 and Rails 4.0.0. It also includes RVM 1.19.6, NGinx 1.4.1, Passenger 4.0.17, SQLite 3.7.15.1, Git 1.8.3 and all required dependencies.

BitNami RubyStack can be deployed using all-in-one free native installers (for Linux and Mac OS X), virtual machines and Amazon Cloud Images as always and we are happy to add Windows Azure as an additional Cloud platform. If you are not familiar with this platform yet, check our Getting Started guide to learn how easy it is to run BitNami applications through the Windows Azure management console.

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Ruby Stack: Now streamlined with PostgreSQL and Node.js options


We are excited to announce a new version of BitNami Ruby Stack!

Ruby Stack is a self-contained, easy to use distribution that makes it simple to get started developing and deploying Ruby On Rails applications. To get started with BitNami Ruby Stack, you can download free, ready-to-run installers for Linux,Windows and Mac OS X, virtual machine images (VMs) and cloud images for the Amazon and Azure clouds.

This release adds PostgreSQL as a database server option. The release also optionally installs the Node.js runtime as part of your development environment.

Another great new feature in the native installers is the option to customize your environment by installing only the components that you plan to use so that you may have the minimal Ruby environment you need for web development.

BitNami Ruby Stack includes Apache, Nginx, MySQL, SQLite, PostgreSQL, ImageMagick, Passenger, Thin, Redis, Varnish Cache server, Sphinx, RVM, DevKit, Subversion, Git, etc. It also includes Node.js and PHP as additional runtimes.

With Ruby Stack, you can now select which web and database servers you want to use. If you choose, you can install phpMyAdmin and/or phpPgAdmin applications to manage your database server. You may want to install additional components like a version control and source code management tool like Subversion or Git, a cache server like Varnish, a search server like Sphinx or a data structure server like Redis.

Ruby Stack is an all-in-one package that provides everything that you need to get started with Ruby development, while letting you choose only the components you want.





Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Security fix for Django and Review Board


Django 1.4.8 and 1.5.4 have been released to address a denial-of-service attack against Django's authentication framework. All users of Django are encouraged to upgrade immediately.

This security issue was reported through public channels and the Django team issued these security releases immediately, less than a week after the previous security fix announcement. More details can be found in the official Django announcement.

If you are running a BitNami Django-based application you can find how to upgrade Django on our wiki.

These Django releases are accompanied with the Review Board 1.7.14 release. Apart from updating to the latest security release for Django, this release of Review Board includes a handful of other bug fixes, including a small security fix affecting some users using private groups and repositories in the API. A complete list of fixes can be found in the Review Board release notes.

Our installers, virtual machine and cloud images for BitNami Django have already been updated. We will releasing an updated version for Review Board, Weblate and Pootle. We will also be removing older versions of the apps from existing cloud repositories such as Amazon and Azure, to prevent end users from inadvertently launching insecure versions of these apps.


Monday, September 16, 2013

PrestaShop 1.5.5 now available in BitNami


We are happy to announce that PrestaShop v1.5.5 is now available in BitNami. PrestaShop is a free and open source e-commerce solution with innovative features to engage shoppers like multi-store support, customizable URLs, full Ajax compatibility, instant guest checkout, abandoned cart reminders and automated email marketing.

You can download free, ready to run native installers, virtual machines and Windows Azure and Amazon EC2 cloud images today.

The major improvements in this new version are:

  - Breakthrough speed and stability
  - New shipping wizard
BitNami PrestaShop also follows the recommended configuration suggestions. These options are enabled by default:

  - Friendly URL
  - Browser cache & compression
  - Combine, Compress & Cache
  - SSL enabled

BitNami PrestaShop also ships the Beetailer module that helps you import your web store onto Facebook. The Beetailer module includes tools for promoting your store and detailed analytics about how well it is doing.


Beetailer module for PrestaShop

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


 Try PrestaShop 1.5.5 in the cloud for free!

Wednesday, September 11, 2013

Security fix for Django, new versions 1.4.7 and 1.5.3 released

Django project has just released new versions of Django. These releases address a directory-traversal vulnerability in one of Django's built-in template tags. While this issue requires some fairly specific factors to be exploitable, Django project encourages all users of Django to upgrade promptly.

We have released BitNami Django 1.4.7 and 1.5.3 installers, virtual machines and Amazon EC2 and Windows Azure cloud images that fix this issue.

BitNami Django stacks also ship the recently released PostgreSQL database version 9.3.0 and PostGIS 2.1.0.

If you have already installed a previous version of these applications please make sure that you update your environment or apply the appropriate patches.

Tuesday, September 10, 2013

Waiting for Drupal 8? Drupal 8 Dev already available in BitNami!

Drupal, one of the most famous open source content management platforms, is getting closer to their next major release: Drupal 8. Although Drupal 8 is not ready yet, we are happy to offer a ready-to-run package with 8.x-dev and drush 7.0-dev (compatible with Drupal 8) so you can get an early look at this much-anticipated release. It can be deployed using all-in-one free native installers (for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X), virtual machines and Cloud Images.





The development of Drupal 8 is being focused in 7 major "core initiatives":
  • + Configuration management: In Drupal 8 configuration lives in files and the database is used only for caching. This allows developers to track changes, put configuration under version control amd update a production site cleanly.
  • + HTML5: This is one of the top 5 initiatives for Drupal 8; switch Drupal's default doctype from XHTML to HTML5 adding support for the new form elements to Drupal’s Form API and other features.
  • + Blocks & Layouts: Drupal 8 provides a standardized mechanism of output components (blocks, page callbacks, menus, theme settings, and more) and new tools for placing content on a page.
  • + Mobile-friendly features: enablement of administrative task management from a mobile device, a mobile responsive design, and an improved front-end performance.
  • + Multilingual: New functionality and tools in Drupal 8 core will make building a site with multiple languages in mind a much easier experience
  • + Views in core: The Views module which is installed on 70% of all Drupal sites, will be part of the Drupal 8 core.
  • + Web Services: With Drupal 8, Drupal evolves from a web CMS into a REST server that includes a web CMS. Drupal doesn't just support web services: Drupal is a web service.

The development phase for Drupal 8 started two years ago and after the feature completion phase, Alpha releases are already available. API changes may still be accepted, and it is time to provide early API feedback before starting updgrading contributed modules and themes once the API is stable. More details about the Drupal release cycle can be found on the Drupal official site.

At BitNami one of our goals is to simplify the testing of the latest versions of open source web applications. BitNami Drupal is completly self-contained and it will not conflict with your current development environment. You can download it, give a try and safely remove it when you are done.

Drupal thrives on developer contributions, and you are encouraged to get involved by testing and provide feedback.



Monday, September 9, 2013

Alfresco 4.2.d released!


We are happy to announce a new version of BitNami Alfresco Stack!

Alfresco is an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system featuring document management, web content management, collaboration management, records management and image management. Since the release of Alfresco 4.2.b nine months ago, the team at Alfresco has fixed a lot of bugs.

Alfresco 4.2.d also includes new features & improvements:
  • + LightTheme: A lighter looking, more modern UI experience
  • + Improved and redesigned Share header component: Includes access to the new application areas.
  • + Simplified Document Library Toolbar
  • Addition of a Filmstrip view that enables rapid viewing of large thumbnails for media files directly from the Gallery View
  • And much more! Details are available on Alfresco's Engineering blog


Installers, virtual machines and cloud images for both Windows Azure and Amazon are already available courtesy of your friendly, neighborhood BitNami team.

Thursday, September 5, 2013

AWS CLI tools Generally Available, BitNami Cloud Tools updated

Amazon just made the General Availability release of the AWS Command Line Interface tool. With this tool you can control and automate multiple AWS services from the command line and scripts.

BitNami Cloud Tools for AWS has been updated to this latest version and also bundle other popular AWS developer tools for the command line. Some of them require third-party software to run, so we have bundled Java, Ruby 1.9, Python and Node.JS runtimes so, with a single download, you get a fully configured environment to start playing with every Amazon API:

- AWS CLI for Python
- EC2 API tools
- EC2 AMI tools
- CloudFormation tools
- SES tools (Simple Email Service)
- SNS tools (Simple Notification Service)
- CloudWatch command line tool
- SDK for Ruby, Java and Node.js
- s3cmd tool
BitNami Cloud Tools for AWS
BitNami Cloud Tools for AWS are available for Windows, OS X and Linux platforms. Enjoy!