Wednesday, February 26, 2014

Introducing Bitnami Cloud Tools for Google Compute Engine

As you may know, we offer free installers for the Windows Azure and Amazon Web Services SDKs, which make it incredibly easy to get a dev environment for either cloud set up on your local machine. Today, we are introducing Bitnami Cloud Tools for the Google Cloud (Google Compute Engine).

The Bitnami Cloud Tools installer packages the Google Cloud command line tools together with preconfigured Python language runtime. It’s a self-contained, easy to use distribution with one goal in mind: to make it simple to get started using Google Cloud services from the command line.

We support Windows, Linux, Linux 64-bit and OS X operating systems. Visit the Bitnami Cloud Tools for Google Compute Engine page to get started, read the documentation, and if you get stuck or need help you can try our forums. Enjoy!

Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Website design and launch in 6 weeks

We're recovering from the whiplash of re-launching our website in 6 weeks from start to finish, but we hope the results will speak for themselves. In addition to redesigning the most trafficked pages, we have upgraded to the latest version of Bootstrap, and rewritten our CSS/HTML from the bottom up. We are also working to improve support for mobile devices, as well as full retina support for all images.

The most asked question we get as a company is "what is Bitnami?" We've attempted to answer that on our new and eponymously named What is Bitnami page. As with any site design, we didn't get everything done that we had hoped to do. There is a good sized backlog of features, graphics, and pages to be added. Nonetheless, we're stoked and hope users will enjoy the new design and UX.

HUGE thanks to our designer, Paul Barrett, for his stellar work and to everyone at Bitnami who gave up sleep to make it happen. Check it out!

Updated Bitnami Website

Thursday, February 20, 2014

Security fix for Rails: 3.2.17 and 4.0.3 released

http://bitnami.com/stack/ruby
New versions of Rails has been released recently that address several security issues:

- CVE-2014-0081 XSS Vulnerability in number_to_currency, number_to_percentage and number_to_human.
- CVE-2014-0080 Data Injection Vulnerability in Active Record.
- CVE-2014-0082 Denial of Service Vulnerability in Action View when using render text.

If you are using Ruby stack for deploying your application, we strongly suggest to upgrade Rails to the latest version. We have released new versions of Ruby Stack native installers (all platforms), virtual machines and Amazon EC2 and Azure cloud images for the following platforms:
  • Ruby Stack 1.9.3, with Ruby 1.9.3-p484 and Rails 3.2.17
  • Ruby Stack 2.0.0, with Ruby 2.0.0-p353 and Rails 4.0.3
  • Ruby Stack 2.1.0, with Ruby 2.1.0 and Rails 4.0.3
Because one of the security issues affects PostgreSQL databases, we also released a new version of the Bitnami Discourse application which includes a fixed version or Rails.

Tuesday, February 18, 2014

ProcessWire added to Bitnami Library!

ProcessWire, our last contest winner, is now part of the Bitnami Library!
https://bitnami.com/stack/processwire
ProcessWire is a free PHP5 content management system and framework (open source CMS/CMF) built to save you time and work the way you do. ProcessWire gives simpler and stronger control over your pages, fields, templates and markup at any scale. And it provides a powerful template system that works the way you already do.
 

Thanks to the amazing community votes, ProcessWire is now ready to install in a few clicks with the Bitnami ProcessWire installers, available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X, Virtual Machine images (VMs) and cloud images for the Amazon EC2 and Azure clouds.


ProcessWire administration Panel



If you just want to check out ProcessWire, you can launch a free cloud demo server in minutes with the Bitnami Cloud Launchpad by clicking the button below. The default admin user is "user" and the password is "bitnami".




Ryan Cramer, lead developer of the ProcessWire open source project, was kind enough to answer a few questions, to let us know more about the project.


1. What is the goal of the ProcessWire application?

ProcessWire brings joy and fun back to web development. It is both a content management framework (CMF) and a content management system (CMS). ProcessWire is an incredibly powerful tool and foundation from which to manage content both interactively and from the API. It is well suited to power web sites, applications, services, and more... at any scale. It is a tool that web developers/designers and content editors/publishers will fall in love with. The goal: enable you to build bigger, faster, stronger and easier, while saving you huge amounts of time.
 

2. What are some of the features of ProcessWire?   

For developers: It empowers developers with a truly solid and powerful framework to build bigger, faster and easier. It's highly flexible and suitable for almost any project: whether a blog, a web-application or a content-heavy corporate portal. It can be easily extended and integrated with other modern web technologies due to its powerful and intuitive API, hook system and modular structure. It's created for those who like to make things the proper way rather then hack them. It has a unique system of fields and templates that lets you build content types of almost any complexity with little effort.

For designers: Creativity without barriers! ProcessWire enables full control of the creative process. Everything you can design in HTML and CSS you can realize in ProcessWire. You don't need to re-design or re-code anything for ProcessWire. It adapts to your workflow rather than the other way around. It is delightfully simple and fun to populate content in your design with ProcessWire.

For content-managers: ProcessWire has a beautifully minimal and easy-to-use backend. But don't be fooled by the simplicity-there's incredible power and flexibility here. ProcessWire makes your content management tasks a joy, regardless of scale. Focused on ensuring the portability, semantics and accessibility of your content, ProcessWire is a breath of fresh air for content managers and editors.

For enthusiasts: ProcessWire has something to offer for those who just need a ready-to-use blog or website. It already has several website profiles that can just be installed and used immediately, or serve as a starting point to build a more personalized project on top. After you download ProcessWire, you can literally have a website up and running in under 5 minutes (and even less thanks to Bitnami). 


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

ProcessWire is equally adept at powering both small and large sites. But it was designed specifically to grow with you and work at the large scale while maintaining the same speed and simplicity. ProcessWire is especially well suited for single or multi-language sites needing to manage large inventories of custom data. As a result, it is widely used by the travel industry, the research and information provider industries, and the design, education and science industries. However, these are just examples as actual usage is far broader than that. For fresh examples of organizations and sites running ProcessWire, visit our Showcase board/.

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

ProcessWire is an able, flexible and highly intuitive package both as a CMS/CMF and site creation tool. It is also a powerful, enterprise ready development environment. Bringing ProcessWire to Bitnami users will not only introduce them to the benefits and shear enjoyment of working with ProcessWire, but will also in return help build further the already strong and enterprising ProcessWire community.


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

Wednesday, February 12, 2014

The new JBoss AS is out: WildFly, a new cutting-edge web server and much more.

Yesterday the first stable release for the WildFly Application Server was announced, WildFly 8.0.0.Final. WildFly is the new name for the JBoss Application Server, however, it is more than just a new name for a new version.

WildFly includes a new cutting-edge web server, Undertow. The number of ports used by the different subsystems has been considerable reduced thanks to the HTTP upgrade feature. Also WildFly is Java EE7 certified, meeting both the Web and the Full profiles (JBoss AS 7 is Java EE 6 Web Profile certified).


Take a look at them by yourself with the Bitnami WildFly deployment options. Bitnami already provides ready-to-run installers for Linux, Windows and Mac OSX , virtual machine images and cloud images for the Amazon EC2 and Azure clouds.

You can learn more about the Bitnami WildFly configuration on our wiki.

Monday, February 10, 2014

Security fix for YAML library. New Ruby stacks updated.

http://bitnami.com/stack/ruby

A new version of YAML library that fixes a security vulnerability has been recently released. This library is widely used for Ruby. The vulnerability is patched in libyaml version 0.1.5.

In case you are not familiar with the Bitnami Ruby stack, it provides a complete development environment for Ruby on Rails that can be deployed in one click. In addition to the base Ruby runtime and libraries, the stack includes most popular gems for building Rails applications: NGinx, Passenger, Redis, Nokogiri, Rake, RMagick, Thin, MySQL, PostgreSQL and more.

We released a new version of Ruby Stack installers for all platforms, virtual machines and Amazon EC2 and Azure cloud images for all supported versions:

  • Ruby Stack 1.9.3, with Ruby 1.9.3-p484 and Rails 3.2.16
  • Ruby Stack 2.0.0, with Ruby 2.0.0-p353 and Rails 4.0.2
  • Ruby Stack 2.1.0, with Ruby 2.1.0 and Rails 4.0.2





Wednesday, February 5, 2014

Talking Discourse: An Interview with Jeff Atwood

Discourse

One of our company founders, Erica Brescia, recently spoke with Jeff Atwood to ask what to look forward to in the 1.0 release of Discourse. We use Discourse for the Bitnami community, and we distribute Discourse for one-click, easy installation with native installers, as virtual machines and into the cloud


The conversation covers a lot of ground including:

  • Why Discourse is a big giant ball of javascript
  • The MySQL and PHP ghetto
  • The cure for PHP server herpes
  • Upcoming features in Discourse 1.0
  • Why working on small features can be better than the big ones
  • And more

Listen to the interview now or read the full transcript below. Click to play, sit back, enjoy.





Full transcript



Erica Brescia: Hi, this is Erica Brescia.  I'm one of the founders of Bitnami and I'm fortunate to have Jeff Atwood here, one of the creators of Discourse to talk a little bit about the Discourse project and what they have coming in the future as they work up to the 1.0 release.  So Jeff, thanks so much for joining me.

Jeff Atwood: Oh, you're welcome.  It's great to be here.

EB: And to start out, you know, discourse is, while popular still, a fairly new project.  I'd love it if you could tell Bitnami users a little bit about the project and what made you decide to start Discourse.

JASure, so the main thing that motivated Discourse was that I couldn't find any forums that I felt comfortable recommending to people that needed communities.  And community is so important on the web and it just made me a little bit sad really that all the options I could find were ones I would nota feel comfortable installing myself.  They just weren't modern for lack of a better word.  There was a lot of really legacy stuff, legacy technology and there was no like leader.  There was nothing like if you were gonna set up a blog and you talk to somebody about it, somebody will say to you WordPress at some point because it's kind of the obvious choice.  It's open source, it's got a great ecosystem.  
You know it's essentially free and there are so many ways to host it and there are so many plug-ins.  And I want there to be something like that for forums because this idea that you have people talking to each other about a topic is really essential I think to a lot of businesses and a lot of communities too.  So discourse is supposed to be, intended to be the WordPress of forums essentially.  That's what we're shooting for.


Monday, February 3, 2014

Review Board PowerPack for Code Review

The makers of Review Board have just released a new add-on product called Power Pack, which extends the capabilities of Review Board.

Review Board Power Pack


Review Board is an open-source code review tool that helps teams review each other's code to improve overall code quality. It makes it easy to scan and review diffs and images that are part of a change.

Power Pack extends Review Board by offering three key features:
  • PDF document review
  • GitHub Enterprise integration
  • Better scalability management

The document review extension brings the same powerful, lightweight review process to PDF files that developers have enjoyed for their source code. Documents are displayed right in the browser without a need for any plug-ins or extra software to be installed. Developers, product managers, documentation writers, legal and anyone else can share documents and comment on them easily and quickly, keeping all the comments and discussion in one place.

GitHub Enterprise is a popular tool used by enterprises to get the power of GitHub with the security of their own networks. With Power Pack, developers can perform code review against GitHub Enterprise repositories, taking advantage of time-saving features pull requests don't offer.

Power Pack also takes care of the harder parts of scaling Review Board across multiple servers, increasing performance for large installations.

Power Pack is licensed under a subscription model. It's priced at $8.33/month per user, which will also entitle you to all new features, fixes, and support. In the coming year, there are plans to include reporting and enhanced code review features, which will come at no additional cost.

As an exclusive benefit to Bitnami users, you can use referral code "BITNAMI" to get 10% off for the first year. That's only $7.50/month per user. Try Review Board today free with Bitnami, then check out Power Pack on the Review Board website.