What's New

For load balanced applications, you can now add a Health Check path to enable active health checks. 🎉

When enabled, Caddy will make an HTTP request every 30 seconds to determine if your application is healthy or not. If your application does not respond with a 200 OK, Caddy will remove the server from the load balancer until the next check that succeeds.

Plus, Rails 7.1 will ship with an /up route specifically for health checks like these out of the box!

You now use our GitHub App for Hatchbox.io deployments! 🎉

This allows you to fine-tune access to your repositories that Hatchbox has access to and it can be configured separately for each organization.

To get started, click the "Connect GitHub" button on your App or Connected Accounts page. Install the Hatchbox GitHub App on your organization and update your app to use the GitHub app for deployments on the Repositories tab.

Existing applications will continue using GitHub OAuth for deployments, but we highly recommend switching to the GitHub Apps integration.

We've built the latest version of Caddy which includes a handful of bugfix improvements.

See the release for more details: https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/releases/tag/v2.6.3

To update your server(s) to the latest Caddy, click the Configure button on your server.

A new version of Ruby has shipped. Just bugfixes, no security vulnerabilities. See the release on Ruby's website: https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2023/02/08/ruby-3-2-1-released/

For Ruby apps, we now support managing cron jobs automatically during deploy using the whenever gem.

Hatchbox now runs "bundle check" before installing gems and if all the gems are installed, it will skip the "bundle install" command. Yay for speed improvements!

We've updated our Postgres backup script to now use the "custom" format. This format is compressed and makes it easier to restore backups using pg_restore, TablePlus, Postico, or your favorite Postgres GUI.

You can now deploy apps with Ruby 3.2

For more details about the release, see: https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2022/12/25/ruby-3-2-0-released/

We've added support for the new Ruby versions: 3.1.3, 3.0.5, and 2.7.7

These new Ruby versions include a security fix for CGI. Read more.

To provide more flexibility, we will no longer set the bundle "without" config. Bundler will install all gems during deploys by default now.

If you would like to speed up deployments as before, you can set the BUNDLE_WITHOUT environment variable to skip development and test groups.

BUNDLE_WITHOUT="development:test"

Ubuntu has released a patch for OpenSSL for the recent CVEs. Rather than upgrading OpenSSL versions, they patch the current version to prevent bugs and regressions in LTS releases.

We've also recompiled all Ruby versions that use OpenSSL 1.1 against OpenSSL 1.1.1s so they also receive the patches. To update your apps, deploy a new version and the updated version of Ruby and OpenSSL will be installed.

The default versions for Ruby and Node.js have been updated to the following:

If your application doesn't specify a version, we'll use these defaults.

See the Help section to learn how to run specific versions of these languages for your applications.

Today, we updated Hatchbox to start installing PostgreSQL 15 and we're also recording the currently running version so you can see it in the Web UI.

For existing users on older versions of PostgreSQL, you can follow this guide to upgrade your databases to the latest version: Upgrading PostgreSQL Version on Ubuntu Server

We've updated Caddy server to version 2.6.2. This adds support for HTTP/3 protocol. Read more about HTTP/3 here. 

Since HTTP/3 utilizes QUIC transport, you'll need to allow UDP traffic in your network/firewall to use it.

To update to this version, click "Configure" on your servers to update them to the latest.

We've updated Hatchbox to support clusters with more unique configurations. Clusters can now deploy apps that don't have a Web Server.

For example, if you've got an app that solely runs background jobs, you can now deploy it with Hatchbox. 👍

You can now upload custom SSL certificates for your applications. We'll upload these to your web servers & load balancers and configure Caddy to use them for serving requests to your app. If you don't want to use LetsEncrypt for some reason, this will make it easy for you to still use SSL. 

We now use the AWS API to look up Regions and Instance Types available to your account. The regions and instance types will always be accurate and list what's available for you to use.

We've just updated deployments to set a few environment variables on each deploy.

We also now write a REVISION file with the git commit sha as well for easy access.

You can now backup your unmanaged (local) Redis database with Hatchbox. Just like PostgreSQL and MySQL backups, you can configure how often they run and where they get uploaded by visiting the database backup settings.

This will backup the entire Redis instance, so you will only need to enable backups on one Redis database in Hatchbox. Redis doesn't treat database separately like other databases.

You can now enable socket activation for processes like Puma.

Why is this important? When HTTP requests hit a server, Caddy will forward the request along to your web server like Puma. Puma is listening on socket and that's how Caddy talks to Puma. During a restart, Puma will stop listening to the socket for a short period of time. Caddy will not receive a response from Puma and will render a 500 error.

With Socket Activation, Systemd will keep the socket open and buffer requests while Puma restarts. During a restart, no requests will be dropped and will simply pause until Puma is ready to start handling requests again.