A New Source of Truth for Bitnami Containers

Over the past few months, the Bitnami content team has been working on unifying the source of truth for the different assets that Bitnami provides to its users.  

Currently, users can find the source code for the Bitnami Helm charts in a single repository on Github (https://github.com/bitnami/charts/) while the source code for the Bitnami containers is spread across different repositories for each solution (for example, https://github.com/bitnami/bitnami-docker-wordpress). 

Now, we have adopted a “monorepo approach” to remove the differences in the user experience between Helm charts and containers on GitHub. Moreover, unifying the repositories where their code lives also allows us to unify all the processes involved in the life cycle of their source code. 

Embracing the Monorepo Approach 

In order to unify both repositories, we have opted to extend the monorepo approach to Bitnami containers as we already did with Helm charts. Thus, container users will be able to navigate through the code of all Bitnami containers by checking only a single repository: https://github.com/bitnami/containers/. 

In addition to an easier way to find the code, users will benefit from:  

• Having all issues located under the same repository makes it easier to find common use cases and avoids duplication which ultimately improves the support workflow 
• Having a single and updated place for general announcements, changes in the contributing guidelines, and so on 
• The possibility of using VMware Image Builder (VIB), a service that allows developers and contributors to verify their Pull Requests (PRs) and thus provide an early feedback loop 

In the coming weeks, the Bitnami team will transfer all valid open issues to the new repository. Then, all the bitnami/bitnami-docker-* repositories will be analyzed in order to identify the valuable issues and migrate them to their new bitnami/containers repo. 

For existing open PRs, we will engage with contributors to find a better way to move their contributions forward into the new bitnami/containers repository. 

In addition, the internal test and release pipeline will be adapted to pull/push changes from the new repository. This is expected to take some time. 

We expect to have a large portion of the data migrated by July 15th.  From that point onwards, repositories will be migrated on a gradual basis. 

How Will Containers Code Look After this Change? 

The existing bitnami/bitnami-docker-* repositories will not disappear. These repositories will be archived in read-only mode so you can continue checking the whole history of the repository changes and existing issues. 

Currently, we plan to delete these repositories after one year, but we would be open to community feedback here. 

Will the source code or the container images change? 

No, the code will be migrated as it is from the different repositories to the monorepo. For example, the source code for PostgreSQL at bitnami/bitnami-docker-postgresql will be moved under the containers/postgresql directory in the bitnami/containers repository. 

Container images will be displayed as usual in the Bitnami DockerHub organization. There won't be any changes to the image itself or to the registries where the image is available. 

Support and Resources  

Looking to learn more or have more questions? Check out the new Bitnami GitHub repository for containers and if you need to get a resolution on issues or want to send us your feedback, please open an issue. A markdown template is provided by default to open new issues, with certain information requested to help us prioritize and respond as soon as possible. 

Also, if you want to contribute to the project, feel free to send us a pull request and the team will check it and guide you in the process for a successful merge.   

Boost your knowledge about Bitnami containers and Helm charts by checking our latest tutorials. 

We Have Moved! Bitnami Support for Installers, VMs, and Cloud Images is Now Available on GitHub

When you have a problem with a Bitnami solution – whether it’s related to downloading an installer or running a virtual machine or cloud image - you navigate to the Bitnami Community site to find the answers and resolutions you’re looking for, both from Bitnami’s support team and from the community of Bitnami users. Through these interactions, we have built a large community of developers that help each other in solving common issues and thereby help you effectively use our catalog.  

A few years ago, we expanded our offerings to containers and Helm charts and began providing support for them in their natural environment: GitHub. Thus, Bitnami users may have had to navigate to two different sites to solve their issues, depending on the format they were running.  

To provide a unified experience, we will be moving the support for our installers, virtual machines, and cloud images to a GitHub repository as well: https://github.com/bitnami/vms.  This change will be effective from June 30th, 2022. This will allow the Bitnami support team to meet the needs of our users from just one location: GitHub. 

The Bitnami Community site will remain open in read-only mode until July 15th, 2022.  We will migrate the most relevant content of this site to the new GitHub repository. If you will miss something, please do not hesitate to open a suggestion issue. Your feedback will help us to make this transition smoother!  

How Can I Submit a Request to the New Bitnami Support Page? 

If you are not familiar with GitHub, no worries! Our team has compiled everything you need to know on the README file, and incorporated a pinned issue to guide you on how to work with this repository. 

The following instructions walk you through the process of opening a new issue to receive support from the Bitnami team:  

• Navigate to https://github.com/bitnami/vms/issues and, in the search box, enter the matter of your issue. Thus, you can check if there is an open issue that matches the topic you are searching for.  

• GitHub shows only open issues by default. Hence, if you can’t find your topic in the resulting search, try to filter by closed issues as shown below: 

• If any of the previous searches do not provide any results, then open a new issue. You can choose amongst three different types of issues depending on the problem you are experiencing: How to (if you want to ask us about how to use a Bitnami solution in a specific scenario), Suggestion (if you have feedback that you think will help us to improve our solutions), or Technical issue (if you are facing a problem or detected a bug when using our applications). 

Our support team will be happy to help you on GitHub! 

 

Collecting Community Feedback: New Improvements and Features in Bitnami Helm Charts

So far this year, the Bitnami Content team has merged more than 700 Pull Requests (PR) in our Helm charts GitHub repository. About half of those PRs are mainly external contributions to the most popular solution, the Bitnami WordPress Helm chart.  

The community actively contributes to the Bitnami’s Helm chart catalog improvement by suggesting new features and reporting issues. This is not the first time that we can say how proud we are of our community, since some of our users also contributed in the past by submitting their own Helm charts.   

Meanwhile, the Bitnami Content Team continuing checking both the PRs and issues submitted by users to identify which are the problems they are dealing with and how we can enhance the user experience and providing the most up to date and secure versions of the community’s favorite applications.  

Find below the list of the latest improvements done in our Helm charts catalog. And don’t forget to check Bitnami documentation and visit our Tutorials site to boost your Kubernetes skills! 

Latest Bitnami Helm Charts New Features and Improvements 

WordPress 

• New feature: Refactor WordPress container image and provide support for Multisite Mode 
• Chart version: 11.0.0 
• More info
• Deployment offering

Elasticsearch and Kibana

• New feature: Both Elasticsearch and Kibana license changes. Both are now licensed under the Elastic License. X-Pack is also now included by default on both Elasticsearch and Kibana 
• Chart version: 15.0.0 (Elasticsearch) and 8.0.0 (Kibana) 
• More info: Elasticsearch / Kibana 
• Deployment offering

MinIO 

• New feature: Support to deploy MinIO as a gateway for other storage systems 
• Chart version: 6.4.0 
• More info
• Deployment offering

Etcd 

• New feature: Performance improvements on scalability and stability 
• Chart version: 6.0.0 
• More info
• Deployment offering

InfluxDB 

• New feature: A major upgrade to InfluxDB 2.0 
• Chart version: 2.0.0 
• More info
• Deployment offering

Visit the Bitnami Helm chart repository in GitHub for more information about our charts’ latest versions and improvements or navigate to the Bitnami Application Catalog for deploying the solution of your choice in any Kubernetes platform.  

Deploy Bitnami Helm Charts

Migration of Bitnami's Helm Charts from Stable Repository to Bitnami's Repository Now Complete

The Helm 3 release has resulted in some important changes that affect chart deployment and chart repositories. These changes have been implemented to facilitate chart maintenance. Keep reading to learn more about the major changes planned for the Helm and Bitnami chart repositories.

What is going to change in Helm charts repositories?

In the next few months, the stable and incubator repositories will be de-listed from all Hubs. They are already excluded in Helm 3 by default. To use these repositories, it is necessary to explicitly add them using the “helm repo add” command. For more information about how the Helm community will use a distributed approach to maintain chart repositories going forward, refer to this proposal.

What does the new distributed approach mean?

Chart maintainers should move the charts they maintain to their own repository, and of course, offer support to users, include them in the Kubeapps Hub, etc.

Given the stable repository deprecation timeline, the Bitnami team has already migrated its contributed charts to the Bitnami charts GitHub repository.

This repository is already included in the Kubeapps Hub and we will provide the same cadence in updates and user support as we have done for the stable repository during the last years.

How to use the Bitnami charts repository

The installation instructions are very similar to the older ones. The main change is that you must first add the bitnami repository to your local Helm installation with the “helm repo add” command and use this repository when installing a specific chart:

$ helm repo add bitnami https://charts.bitnami.com/bitnami


$ helm install my-release bitnami/<chart> # Helm 3


$ helm install --name my-release bitnami/<chart> # Helm 2


How to contribute to the Bitnami charts repository?

Going forward, any new issues or pull requests (PRs) related to Bitnami’s charts should be created in the Bitnami GitHub repository. Likewise, we will redirect to that repository all the Issues and PRs that were created in the stable repository before the date of the transition.

We are open to accepting new chart contributions in the Bitnami repository. Such charts will be integrated into our release pipeline, which implies that they will benefit from automatic updates for container images, daily testing, CVE scanning, etc. If you want to submit a new chart, don’t hesitate to create a new PR!

We will also be happy to answer your questions about this change! Post them to this issue thread opened in the stable repository. This thread also has information about the reasons for this transition and how to follow up on the process.

Deploying Redmine on Google Cloud Platform with Kubernetes

We’re excited to be headed to Portland to support the community launch of Kubernetes 1.0 today. We just put the finishing touches on our latest walk-through. It provides a step-by-step guide on how to deploy a distributed, scalable version of Redmine on Google Cloud Platform using Kubernetes and the Bitnami Container Images for Docker.

If you’re attending the Kubernetes launch or OSCON, we would love to connect and get your thoughts. We also welcome feedback, issues or improvements via GitHub.

Bitnami participates in the GitHub Student Developer Pack

The GitHub Student Developer Pack is a collection of developer tools made available to students free of charge. Students enrolled in degree granting programs at all levels will be eligible to sign up for this pack to get free GitHub Micro accounts with 5 private repositories. Besides that, those students will have free access to an entire suite of useful developer tools from selected companies.


Since this program is intended to give students free access to the best developer tools, we're happy to announce that Bitnami is participating; when signing up for the GitHub Student Developer Pack, students will have free access to the Business 3 plan in Bitnami Cloud Hosting for a year - a $588 value! This plan allows users to launch and manage up to 3 cloud servers on the Amazon Cloud (AWS) from Bitnami's library of close to 100 applications and development stacks. This means that students can get a fully-configured and ready to use development environment for LAMP, Django, Ruby on Rails or Node.js, or apps such as Redmine, Jenkins, Drupal, TestLink and more up and running in just a few clicks in the cloud!

To learn more and sign up for the GitHub Student Developer Pack, you can visit this link.

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 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.