Rails security issue (CVE 2019-5418, 2019-5419, and 2019-5420)

New versions of Rails have been released recently to address several security issues:

• CVE-2019-5418 File Content Disclosure in Action View

• CVE-2019-5419 Denial of Service Vulnerability in Action View

• CVE-2019-5420 Possible Remote Code Execution Exploit in Rails Development Mode (only for 5.2.2.1 and 6.0.0.beta3)

It is highly recommended that you upgrade Rails to the new patched versions: 4.2.11.1, 5.0.7.2, 5.1.6.2, 5.2.2.1, and 6.0.0.beta3

Bitnami is publishing updates which will be available in all formats soon.

For more details about these security issues, please check the information provided in the official Ruby On Rails blog. If you have further questions about Ruby or this security issue, please post to our community forums and we will be happy to help you.

Ruby 2.5 now available on Bitnami

We are happy to announce the release of Ruby 2.5. The Bitnami Ruby Stack provides a complete, ready-to-run development environment for Ruby on Rails. This release comes with lots of new features and improvements.

Here are some highlights:

• rescue/else/ensure are allowed inside do/end blocks.
• Add yield_self to yield given block in its context. Unlike tap, it returns the result of the block. 
• Support branch coverage and method coverage measurement. The branch coverage indicates which branches are executed and which are not.
• Struct.new can create classes that accept keyword arguments.
• Top-level constant look-up is no longer available.
• About 5-10% performance improvement by removing all trace instructions from overall bytecode (instruction sequences).
• Block passing by a block parameter is about 3 times faster than Ruby 2.4.
• Mutex is rewritten to be smaller and faster.
• ERB now generates code from a template twice as fast as Ruby 2.4.

You can read about all the new features and improvements in the official release notes.

Do you want to try these new features? Deploy the Bitnami Ruby Stack in just one click. To get started, you can choose to use our free all-in-one native installers, virtual machines, or launch it in the cloud.

Launch Ruby 2.5 Now

Security Issue: RubyGems

Ruby project has published a security advisory due to multiple moderate-severity vulnerabilities in RubyGems bundled by Ruby. The reported issues are:

• A DNS request hijacking vulnerability
• An ANSI escape sequence vulnerability
• A DoS vulnerability in the query command
• A vulnerability in the gem installer that allowed a malicious gem to overwrite arbitrary files

The following versions are affected:

• Ruby 2.2.7 and earlier
• Ruby 2.3.4 and earlier
• Ruby 2.4.1 and earlier

At this time, there are no Ruby releases with the fix for RubyGems. It is strongly recommended to apply one of the following workarounds:

• Upgrade RubyGems to the latest version (2.6.13) by executing:

     $ gem update --system 

• Apply the patch for your version:
• For Ruby 2.2.7: patch
• For Ruby 2.3.4: patch
• For Ruby 2.4.1: patch1 and patch2 (apply sequentially)

You can find more info about this issue in the links below:

RubyGems project
Hacker News

If you have further questions about Ruby or this security issue, please post to our community forums and we will be happy to help you.

New Bitnami Ruby Stacks

We have just released new versions of the Bitnami Ruby stack, which fixes the CVE-2015-7551 security issue in all of the versions below.

• Ruby 2.0.0-p648 
• Ruby 2.1.8 
• Ruby 2.2.4 

In case you are not familiar with the Bitnami Ruby Stack, it includes the base Ruby runtime/libraries, and the most popular gems for building Rails applications such as Passenger, Nokogiri, Rake, RMagick, Thin and more. It also includes the latest stable versions of Rails, Apache, Nginx, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Git, Sphinx, PHP, phpMyAdmin and phpPgAdmin.

We have released new versions of the Bitnami Ruby Stack native installers for Linux, OS X, Windows, virtual machines and cloud images for Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine, Microsoft Azure, vCloud Air, Digital Ocean and Oracle cloud platform.

If you have any question about Bitnami RubyStack you can check our quick start guide or you can create a new post in our community forums.

Bitnami Container Images for Docker - Now in Beta

We’re very happy to announce availability of the first set of Bitnami container images focused on the needs of application developers. We’ve been using containers internally for close to a year and have found them useful, both for local and cloud-based development and testing.

Bitnami container images can help you:

• Reduce the time it takes to setup a developer on a new project
• Reduce friction when sharing environments - experience less “but it worked on my machine?” 
• Mix and match languages for specific projects - with consistency, regardless of the components you select

As with any rapidly evolving technology, we’ve run into a few bumps along the way, but believe that containers offer an interesting way to collaborate on your next software project and that they are complementary to our existing installers, virtual machines, and cloud images.

We’re starting small and initially focused on the needs of Web developers. Today we’re announcing beta Bitnami container images for nginx, php-fpm, mariadb, memcached, node, redis, apache, and ruby.

Our container images have been built around some key ideas we wanted, but found lacking, in other publicly available container images. Bitnami containers for Docker:

• Share a common base OS (initially Ubuntu 14.04) to minimize time-to-get-started
• Are kept up-to-date with consistent version tagging
• Are easy to combine into a multi-tier application because they are consistently documented and take a standardized approach to configuration, bootstrapping, and logging
• Separate data from code to enable upgrading of individual components
• Include run-time notification of new versions

Bitnami container images are available now on the Docker Hub Registry and on GitHub. A walk-through of  how to use these container images to package a real-world application is also available.

We’re very interested in feedback from you on how these container images could be improved. Please open issues with ideas for enhancements or use cases on GitHub. We welcome contributions to the code, so please open a pull request if you have code to share.

Click here to get Bitnami container images for Docker.

Bitnami applications available in the OpenStack Community App Catalog

Today the Open Stack Foundation announced a new resource for sharing applications and developer tools during a keynote at the OpenStack Summit. The Community App Catalog — now available in beta — is open for contributions and will be curated by the community.

Five Bitnami stacks are featured the inaugural community catalog, including MEAN, Jenkins, Ruby Stack, LAMP Stack, Wordpress. This gives cloud users and developers point-and-click access to the applications, as well as a way to collaborate and access new technologies in the OpenStack ecosystem.

Bitnami is pleased to be a part of the effort to make installing cloud stacks and apps easier, alongside products from ActiveState, Google, Oracle and RedHat.

Have you explored the community catalog? We’d love to hear what you think. Share your opinion in the comments below. Or read the announcement from the OpenStack Foundation to learn more.

Security fix for Ruby: new versions 2.2.2 and 2.0.0-p645 released

The Ruby project has just released new versions that fix the CVE-2015-1855 Ruby OpenSSL Hostname Verification security issue. You can find more information about these issues on Ruby’s blog post.

We have released Bitnami Ruby installers, virtual machines and Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine and Windows Azure cloud images with Ruby 2.2.2 and 2.0.0-p645 versions, and we will continue working on the release of the Ruby 2.1.6 version also. 

Fat Free CRM added to Bitnami Library

We're happy to introduce Fat Free CRM as part of the Bitnami library!

Fat Free CRM is an open source Ruby on Rails-based customer relationship management platform. Out of the box it features group collaboration, campaign and lead management, contact lists and opportunity tracking. The project goal is to spur CRM innovation by providing a clean code base that can be easily extended by developers.

Fat Free CRM is now ready to install in a few clicks with the Bitnami Fat Free CRM installers (available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X), Virtual Machine images (VMs) and Amazon EC2, Google and Windows Azure cloud images.

If you want to check out Fat Free CRM, simply launch a free cloud demo server. Click the button below to get your own Fat Free CRM instance running for 1 hour, for free!

We also had the opportunity to interview Steve Kenworthy, Maintainer of the project, who was kind enough to answer some of our questions:

What is the goal of the Fat Free CRM application?

The goal of Fat Free CRM is to provide a light-weight customer relationship management platform. It provides a core set of features that can be easily extended through the Admin UI to fit an organization's specific requirements.

What are some of the features of Fat Free CRM?

Fat Free CRM allows users to initiate leads, promote them to contacts and accounts, log opportunities and track campaigns. It provides the ability to extend account, contact, opportunity and campaign data with custom fields more tailored to an organization's needs. There is also a basic task management system to help track actions and help teams collaborate. The software is translated into over 15 languages and has a flexible plugin architecture designed to enable developers to easily write add-ons.

Which projects or organizations are using Fat Free CRM currently?  What kind of projects do they use it for?

We have a wide range of organizations using the system: 

• Corporations working in areas such as real estate, cloud services, healthcare and telecommunications
• Charities, universities and student groups
• Developer and consulting firms customizing for their clients (the software is MIT licensed)

It's usage varies widely as it is tailored to suit an organization's specific requirements. On the whole, it's about contact management.

What do you expect will be the main benefits of having Bitnami packages available for Fat Free CRM?

The Bitnami installers will help those who are wanting to get Fat Free CRM up and running very quickly without needing to set it up themselves. For those wanting to see what it can do, it's a one-click option to try it out.

Developers will be able to get a consistent, standards-based full-stack running much more quickly and the ability to install on cloud hosting providers opens up a huge number of deployment scenarios.

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

New Bitnami Ruby Stack with Ruby 2.2.0 and Rails 4.2.0

We are happy to announce that we have just released the Bitnami Ruby Stack with Ruby 2.2.0 and Rails 4.2.0. 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.

If you are not familiar with the 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 2.4.10, MySQL 5.5.40, PostgreSQL 9.3.5, Ruby 2.2.0 and Rails 4.2.0. It also includes RVM, NGINX, Passenger, Git, Redis, Node.js and all required dependencies.

Bitnami Ruby Stack can be deployed using all-in-one free native installers (for Linux and Mac OS X), virtual machines and the most popular public cloud providers: Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure and Google Compute Engine.

The main changes in the new Ruby 2.2.0 are the following:

• Ruby’s Garbage Collector is now able to collect Symbol type objects. This reduces memory usage of Symbols
• Experimental support for using vfork(2) with system() and spawn() have also been added. This could potentially bring huge speed-up when a large process executes external commands many times
• Additional option for configure.in to use jemalloc. This feature is still experimental and currently deactivated by default

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.

Get started with Ruby on Rails with Bitnami Ruby Stack 2.2.0 in your local machine or in the cloud now!

OpenProject added to Bitnami Library!

We are happy to announce that OpenProject is now available on the Bitnami library.

OpenProject is a free and open source software for project management with a wide set of features and plugins and an active community. With the multitude of features and plugins, OpenProject offers support for your teams throughout the whole project life cycle.  

OpenProject is now ready to install in a few clicks with the Bitnami OpenProject installers (available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X), Virtual Machine images(VMs), cloud images for the Amazon EC2, Goole Compute Engine or Azure cloud platforms.

If you want to quickly check out OpenProject, you can launch a free cloud demo server. By clicking the button below, you will have your own OpenProject instance running for 1 hour, for free!

We also had the opportunity to interview Birthe Lindenthal, Chairperson of the OpenProject
Foundation's Board of Directors, who was so kind to answer the questions below: 

What is the goal of the OpenProject application?

OpenProject is free and open source software for project management. It provides project teams a
multitude of features and plugins for web-based project collaboration: From the initial set-up of a
project plan, to tracking of requirements and tasks, reporting status or documentation. The mission of OpenProject is to build excellent open source software. And when I say open source, I mean it. We
strive to make OpenProject a place to participate, collaborate, and get involved — with an active,
open-minded, transparent, and innovative community.

OpenProject was ranked among the top 5 open source project management tools of 2014. 

What are some of the features of OpenProject?

The most important core features of OpenProject are:

• Work package tracking which allows users to easily monitor all project activities, delegate and manage tasks, requirements, bugs and much more
• Interactive timeline reports to visualize and track a project's progress, see changes at a glance, and compare it over time
• Time tracking to monitor spent time on different activities within a project
• Integrated SVN or Git Repository to manage and share code or other project artifacts
• Project wiki to create and share project documentation collaboratively
• Calendar, News and Forum to visualize and share project information among team members

A multitude of plugins enhance the core functionality with additional features:

• Backlogs plugin adds Scrum functionality. It allows for sprint and product backlogs, task boards and burn-down charts as well as the option to export story cards as PDF to print and use them physically (via the PDF export plugin)
• Meeting plugin allows easy organization of meetings (prepare and share agendas, meeting minutes)
• Costs and Reporting plugin support budgeting and cost management
• Documents plugin allows easy upload and exchange of documents

To use additional languages (apart from English and German), the translations plugin can be
installed which adds more than 30 additional languages provided by users via CrowdIn. 
Furthermore, OpenProject is fully accessible, for example for blind team members using screen readers. Additionally a lot of security features were added to comply with highest security and data privacy requirements (e.g. password management, account protection, privacy settings).

What is the OpenProject Foundation about?

As I mentioned previously, OpenProject aims to establish an active, and global community that
participates in the project and benefits from each other. The OpenProject Foundation (OPF) was
established to ensure that the participation in the project is well governed. The OPF was started by
OpenProject’s developers and users in October 2012.

One of the main goals of the OPF is to ensure that the project exists beyond the participation of a few individuals. There has to be a clear and transparent way of how decisions are made and what will be added to the application core. The OPF provides a framework for technical decisions and the
propagation, acceleration, and perpetuation of development by the community, and by a full-time
development team, funded by the members of the OPF. The members meet on a regular basis to
discuss and align on OpenProject topics.

The OpenProject Foundation objectives are:

• Establish and promote an active and open community of developers, users, and companies for continuous development of the open source project.
• Define and develop the project vision, the code of conduct, and principles of the application.
• Create development policies and ensure their compliance.
• Define and evolve the development and quality assurance processes.
• Provide the source code to the public.
• Provide and operate the OpenProject platform.

The association does not pursue economic goals of its own. 

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

OpenProject is used by a great variety of organizations, ranging from large corporations, small and
medium sized companies to NGOs.

Well-known companies using OpenProject include Deutsche Telekom, Siemens, WDR, Telefonica and
congstar.

Due to the wide range of features and plugins, the use cases differ significantly among different companies: Ranging from issue tracking and incident management to large scale release management and planning across many Business Units. OpenProject provides many helpful features combined with a high degree of customization.

In combination with the Backlogs plugin, OpenProject is also often used by Scrum Teams organizing
their (Agile) development with digital product backlogs and taskboard in addition to an integrated
version control (supporting SVN and Git). 

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

In the past the installation of RoR-applications required a reasonable knowledge of the technology
stack. The automated Bitnami installers provide a fast and comfortable way to install OpenProject and therefore make it much easier for users to get started with OpenProject. Also, the OpenProject
Foundation does not support Windows. So it is great that Bitnami now provides a solution for Windows users to use OpenProject.

Thanks a lot to the Bitnami team for this great support.

We hope that more and more users become passionate and are motivated to get involved in the open source project making OpenProject even better, with open source and open mind. 

You can follow the OpenProject on Twitter and participate in discussions on OpenProject.org.  

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

New Bitnami Ruby stacks released with Ruby 2.1.5, 2.0.0-p598 and 1.9.3-p551

We recently released new versions of Ruby stacks that fix several security issues. An additional fix for DoS vulnerability CVE-2014-8090 has been released for all Ruby versions.

We have released new versions of Bitnami Ruby Stack native installers for Linux and OS X, virtual machines and cloud images for Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine and Microsoft Azure.

- Ruby Stack 2.1.5: with Ruby 2.1.5 and Rails 4.1.7

- Ruby Stack 2.0.0-23: with Ruby 2.0.0-p598 and Rails 4.1.7

- Ruby Stack 1.9.3-27: with Ruby 1.9.3-p551 and Rails 3.2.20

We continue working on upgrading Ruby versions for Windows that will be released soon.

In case you are not familiar with Ruby Stack, in addition to the base Ruby runtime and libraries, the stack includes the most popular gems for building Rails applications: Passenger, Nokogiri, Rake, RMagick, Thin and more. It also includes the latest stable version of RVM, Rails, Apache, Nginx, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Git, Sphinx, PHP, phpMyAdmin and phpPgAdmin.

If you have any question about Bitnami RubyStack you can check our quick start guide or you can create a new post in our community forums.

New Ruby stacks with latest Ruby and Rails versions

New versions of Ruby and Rails have been released recently that address several security issues:

- Rails: CVE-2014-7818
- Rails: CVE-2014-7819
- Ruby: CVE-2014-8080
- Ruby: Changed default settings of ext/openssl

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 cloud images for the following platforms:

- Ruby Stack 2.0.0: with Ruby 2.0.0-p594 and Rails 4.1.7
- Ruby Stack 2.1.4: with Ruby 2.1.4 and Rails 4.1.7

We continue working on the new Ruby 1.9.3-p550 version with the latest Rails 3.2.20 that will be released soon.

In addition to the base Ruby runtime and libraries, the stack includes the most popular gems for building Rails applications: Passenger, Nokogiri, Rake, RMagick, Thin and more. It also includes the latest stable release of Ruby, RVM, Rails, Apache, Nginx, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Git, Sphinx, PHP, phpMyAdmin and phpPgAdmin.

If you have any question about Bitnami RubyStack you can check our quick start guide or you can create a new thread in our community forums.

New RubyStack version in Bitnami Library

We are happy to announce that we have updated our Bitnami RubyStacks (2.0.0-20 and 2.1.2-3) to the latest versions of Passenger, Node.js, PHP and Nginx, among others.

If you are not familiar with it, Bitnami RubyStack provides a fully-configured and ready to run Ruby on Rails development environment. You can download or deploy it to the cloud free of charge with our ready-to-run installers, virtual machine images (VMs), Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) or Azure Images

In addition to the base Ruby runtime and libraries, the stack includes the most popular gems for building Rails applications: Passenger, Nokogiri, Rake, RMagick, Mongrel, Thin and more. It also includes the latest stable release of Ruby, RVM, Rails, Apache, NGinx, MySQL, SQLite, Git, Varnish, Sphinx, PHP and phpMyAdmin.

All updates to this development stack are listed in it's changelog, but below are the main components:

• Updated Passenger to 4.0.50
• Updated Node.js to 0.10.31
• Updated PHP to 5.4.32
• Updated Nginx to 1.6.1

If you have any question about Bitnami RubyStack you can check our quick start guide or you can create a new thread in our community forums .

Upgraded Ruby 2.0 in the Ubuntu Bitnami Cloud Hosting base images

We recently released a new version of the our Ubuntu base image, rev 31. This version includes Ruby 2.0.0-p481, which will allow you to deploy the most recent version of Ruby applications like Redmine, Discourse and others.

The Ubuntu Bitnami Cloud Hosting servers are not only great for deploying Bitnami applications, but are also ideal for deploying your own applications. The fact that you can find recent versions of Apache, MySQL, PHP, Ruby, and many more, plus include tools like subversion or Git, makes it that much easier. Together with Ruby we have upgraded other major components like Apache HTTP Server, MySQL, MongoDB, PHP and Redis. You can find the full list of components included in this version, here.

Apart from one click deployment, Bitnami Cloud Hosting makes easier to manage your servers providing automated backups and one click restoring, scheduled tasks, cloning of servers and monitoring. You can learn more about all these great features on our website, and don't hesitate to contact us at sales [at] bitnami [dot] com with any question you may have! 

New Ruby Stack with Rails 3.2.18 and 4.1.1 released

We are happy to announce a new release of all Bitnami Ruby Stack versions:

- 1.9.3-24: With Ruby 1.9.3-p545 and Rails 3.2.18
- 2.0.0-14: With Ruby 2.0.0-p451 and Rails 4.1.1
- 2.1.1-2: With Ruby 2.1.1 and Rails 4.1.1

These Rails versions contain a fix for the security issue described in CVE-2014-0130.

Bitnami Ruby Stack provides a complete development environment for Ruby on Rails that can be deployed with one click. It includes the latest stable release of Ruby, RVM, Rails, Apache, NGinx, MySQL, SQLite, Git, Varnish, Sphinx, PHP and phpMyAdmin. In addition to the base Ruby runtime and libraries, the stack includes most popular gems for building Rails applications: Passenger, Nokogiri, Rake, RMagick, Mongrel, Thin and more.

You can download installers for Windows, OS X or Linux, virtual machines or deploy pre-made Amazon EC2 and Azure cloud images.

If you have already installed a previous version, please make sure you update the Rails gems to a fixed version.

Security fix for YAML library. New Ruby stacks updated.

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

Rails security issue: Bitnami apps updated

Several important Rails security vulnerabilities were recently published. They affect the current 3.2 and 4.0 versions of the Rails framework. You can find more info about them at this Rails blog post.

If you are using Bitnami Ruby Stack, it is recommended that you upgrade Rails to the new patched versions: 3.2.16 or 4.0.2. We just released new versions of the installers, virtual machines and Amazon EC2 or Azure cloud images that ship the updated Rails 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 2.0.1preview2,   with Ruby 2.0.1preview2 and Rails 4.0.2

We have released updated Redmine, GitLab, Spree, Tracks, Gitorious stacks with the latest Rails version and will shortly release new versions of Discourse, Publify and Diaspora.

For more details about these security issues please check the information provided in the official Ruby On Rails blog. If you already have installed a version of these applications please make sure that you update your environment or apply the appropriate patches.

Ruby security issue: Applications Updated on BitNami

A Ruby security vulnerability was recently published: Heap Overflow in Floating Point Parsing. We want to let BitNami users know that our Rails-based application installers, virtual machines and cloud images have been updated already and released: Redmine, Tracks, Discourse, GitLab, Publify, Spree or Gitorious, Diaspora and we continue releasing others like Radiant.

We have also updated our development Ruby Stacks to include the latest patched version of Ruby: 1.9.3, 2.0.0 and 2.0.1preview.

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

Diaspora*, the Online Social World Where You are in Control

Diaspora* is an Open Source distributed social networking service. It was released as part of the BitNami Library a month ago.

You can now download free, ready to run native installers for OS X and Linux, virtual machines and Azure and Amazon EC2 images for Diaspora*. You can also now launch a free cloud demo server with the BitNami Cloud Launchpad by clicking the launch button below.

Jason Robinson, one of the Diaspora* project contributors, 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 Diaspora* application?

The goal of the Diaspora* application is to allow people to control their own social network. A lot of people distrust the large centralized social networks, especially now after all the Prism revelations. With Diaspora*, users can host their own data and only share around the network parts of that data. We call these servers "pods". When a user installs a pod (for example using the BitNami packages), that pod will be able to communicate with users on other pods just like you can communicate with other users on Facebook for example. The difference is that the user hosts their own data and thus has more control.

The purpose does not end in privacy. An important thing to note is of course that Diaspora* is open source. Got coding skills and miss a feature in your favourite social network? With Diaspora* you can make that feature - just talk to the project first if you also want it merged into the main code base https://wiki.diasporafoundation.org/How_we_communicate

Of course you don't need to host a pod to join Diaspora*. Just go to http://podupti.me which is a good pod list, select a pod near you and sign up!

Diaspora* dashboard

2. What are some of the features of Diaspora*?


The most awesome feature that sets Diaspora* apart from the other social networks is the flexibility when composing posts. Posts support full markdown syntax, which means you can even use it for blogging (like Tumblr). Another distinctive feature is that there are different kind of streams that you can view - and by default all the streams are combined for easy of use. Streams can be posts from people you follow, posts with followed hashtags, posts with interactions (like mentions), and you can also group people into Aspects (like Circles in G+) and view only one or more streams at a time. Image uploads in posts are supported with a nice lightbox style picture viewer.

All in all the UI is very modern and nice to use for a user with any technical level. Unlike Facebook for example, it is more minimal, since Diaspora* doesn't make you "spy" on your friends activities in real time, we don't have a gazillion of apps posting in your feed, and of course there are no ads or promoted posts, only stuff you really want to see.

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


Since Diaspora* is decentralized, which means that there is no central pod and no central authority to govern the network, the project does not and cannot be aware of all Diaspora* installations. I've heard of and seen some company internal pods that the rest of the network never becomes aware of since the users on the pod don't (or cannot due to firewalls) share data outside their own pod. One list of pods, built from interactions by the pod maintainer, lists currently 101 Diaspora* pods https://diapod.net/active, of which over half are open for sign ups.

Some notable organizations having official Diaspora* accounts are Mozilla (fr), KDE community, Jolla, FairPhone, Loomio, LibreOffice Design, ownCloud and Kolab, to name a few.

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

Diaspora* is kind of tricky to install at the moment - well, before BitNami that is. We have well documented installation instructions for all major Linux platforms, but unfortunately following those still requires you are familiar with web applications and servers. With BitNami users who want to host their pod can do so easily without hassle, and that is great indeed. The best thing is that users have more choice now, and we will be striving to increase those choices.

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

JRuby 1.7.5 released!

We are happy to announce a new version of JRuby stack: 1.7.5. For those of you who may not be familiar with the project, JRuby is a 100% Java implementation of the Ruby programming language. It is Ruby for the JVM. JRuby provides a complete set of core “builtin” classes and syntax for the Ruby language, as well as most of the Ruby Standard Libraries.

The goal of JRuby 1.7 point releases is to fill out any missing compatibility issues with Ruby 1.9.3. This version fixed a number of issues related to compatibility and performance. You can find the list of the bugs fixed and new features here.

BitNami JRuby stack is a free self-contained package that simplifies the development and deployment of JRuby applications. This version includes ready-to-run versions of Java 1.7.0_40, Apache Tomcat 7.0.42, MySQL 5.5.32, JRuby 1.7.5 and all required dependencies.

It can be deployed using all-in-one free native installers (for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X), virtual machines and Cloud Images. Check it out!