What's New

We've refactored our deployment process to make renaming applications faster. Rather than symlinking to full paths, we're now using relative symlinks. This allows us to move an application to a new directory and update the running processes to point to the new directory. 

We no longer need to remove any directories which preserves your application's uploaded files, local sqlite databases, and removing the need for an additional deployment after renaming. Thanks to these improvements, renaming your application only takes a few seconds now.

We've precompiled the latest version of Ruby so it's ready to go for new deployments.

See the release notes for more details: https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2024/07/09/ruby-3-3-4-released/

Want to run a script to notify Slack or another service about failed deployments? Now you can with failed deploy scripts.

When a deployment fails, the script will run on your primary server which you can use to send API requests or anything else you might want to do. 

You can now choose names for your databases. Previously, we auto-generated database names that were quick and easy but hard to differentiate. Now you can choose the name to help easily differentiate between databases.

Two new versions of Ruby were recently released and we've precompiled them so they're ready to use with Hatchbox!

See the release notes for more details: https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2024/05/30/ruby-3-3-2-released/

With the latest Ubuntu LTS release out last month and running smoothly, we've updated Hatchbox to start creating new servers with Ubuntu 24.04 now.

Redis.io has finally updated their repositories with Ubuntu Noble 24.04 LTS support. We've updated our configuration to use this repository to provide the latest Redis version. Hit configure on your Ubuntu 24.04 server(s) to use the new repository.

Caddy now includes a DNSimple plugin for handling wildcard SSL validation with LetsEncrypt. We've recompiled Caddy with this new plugin and added DNSimple to the supported DNS providers list so you can now use it for wildcard SSL certificates.

Doing fancy things with Caddy? You can now supply your own URL for your custom Caddy executables. Edit your Cluster and add the URL for it to be installed on your servers during provisioning.

We recommend using our Caddy Builder script as a starting place to make sure you include any necessary DNS providers for wildcard SSL support. You can also compile specific versions of Caddy with additional plugins as needed.

Ubuntu 24.04 LTS was recently released and we've updated Hatchbox to support this new version.

The official Redis.io Ubuntu repository has not been updated yet. If you're using Redis on Ubuntu 24.04, it will install the Ubuntu maintained version until the Redis repository is updated.

We've precompiled the latest Ruby versions which include several security fixes.

See the Ruby release notes for more details.

A few versions of rclone have a bug while running the "selfupdate" command. We've added a fix to detect this error and install the newest version when the update fails.

Hatchbox will also now update rclone during the configuration process to make sure you're using the latest version.

Apps using the whenever gem to manage cron jobs will now respect the RAILS_ENV environment variable when installing cron jobs.

Previously, the environment was not set when running whenever which defaults to the "production" environment, regardless of the RAILS_ENV set in environment variables.

We're excited to announce Bun support on Hatchbox! If your repository contains a bun.lockb file, Hatchbox will install the latest bun or the version specified in .tool-versions.

Ruby 3.3 was released yesterday and is now precompiled for use on Hatchbox!

See What's New in Ruby 3.3 and the release notes.

We have updated our Akamai / Linode integration to remove the need for personal access tokens. Using a different OAuth configuration we were able to remove the need for personal access tokens entirely which makes for a cleaner and simpler integration.

For Akamai / Linode users, you will be prompted to reconnect your account when viewing your clusters. This will reestablish the connect using our improved integration. 

The Hatchbox Deploy GitHub Action got a new release today with version 2.

The new version deploys the specific commit sha that triggered the GitHub Action instead of the latest commit in the specified branch. This makes it easier to make sure the deployments made during CI/CD are the exact commits that you want.

Assets from the Rails asset pipeline or webpacker are compiled with a hash at the end of the filename which allows them to be cached indefinitely. Today, we rolled out an update so Caddy will automatically add the Cache-Control header.

To use this new feature, use the Update Caddy button on one of the apps in your cluster. This will write the new Caddy config and enable the Cache-Control header. If you've customized your Caddy configuration, make sure to add the new variable to your config first.

We've added unmanaged Elasticsearch & Memcached support! You can add this role to servers when you're editing or creating them. This will install and configure Elasticsearch and/or memcached on your servers.

Elasticsearch
Once installed, you can add Elasticsearch to your applications. This will set the ELASTICSEARCH_URL env var to your server's IP address. Elasticsearch uses SSL, so Hatchbox will automatically install the self-signed SSL certificate on your application servers to allow HTTPS access.

Memcached
Memcached is an excellent choice as a cache store for your applications. While Redis defaults to persisting all keys, Memcached is built specifically for handling caches and clearing out least recently used cache keys as needed.

We've configured memcached with SASL2 authentication so attaching Memcached to your applications will setup several environment variables with the connection information.