November started out great with the OTF summit. We had some very good conversations about the future of collaboration using open source tools and a lot of other interesting talks and sessions too!
Other than that, we have mostly made progress on the single sign-on and automatic updates front.
Single sign-on
A helm chart was created, which makes it easy to install the single sign-on solution and the user backend on OpenAppStack.
We investigated if we could use Maester to manage oauth clients. It adds a “custom resource definition” to Kubernetes which you can use to add Oauth clients. This would make it easier for us to add application integrations with the single sign-on system. However the project is still in an early development stage and we’re waiting for them to release some features we need.
Lastly we’ve been working on showing an overview of the applications that are available to a user in the user panel.
Automatic updates
At the end of November, our first applications were ready for automatic updates. What does this mean exactly? Nextcloud and ONLYOFFICE are now maintained by Flux. A piece of software that can detect if we have changed which version of the software should be installed in OpenAppStack. If a change is detected, the new version is installed in OpenAppStack.
At the moment, changes from our side are not yet automatically detected on running clusters. You still need to manually run a script to update. But we’re very close to removing the manual intervention completely for production clusters.
Documentation
We started a troubleshooting document to our documentation website, to make it easier for testers. We also found a bug in our alpha test version 0.2.1 so we released a new version 0.2.2 to fix that. We updated the alpha test instructions to point to the new version.
Maintenance
Apart from things directly linked to our goals, we have to maintain the systems we have created so far. This month, we:
- Updated cert-manager to use chart version 0.11.0
- Reduced how long CI pipeline takes (tip: if you build docker containers with Kaniko, you’ll want to enable caching!)
- Made Nextcloud’s debug mode configurable
- Combined the Nextcloud and Onlyoffice helm chart for easier maintenance on our side
- Increased the maximum upload size of files to ONLYOFFICE