What's new in eLabFTW 4.3.0

I’m very pleased to announce that eLabFTW, the free and open source electronic lab notebook version 4.3 is now available for everyone!

So what’s new in this version?

You can see the complete changelog on the release page. This blog post is more about going into details for some of the changes.

How to update

Update like usual: see documentation.

New features

General

  • Soft delete: an entry will now be marked as deleted instead of being actually deleted from the database
  • Same with uploaded files that are replaced
  • More than 22 bugfixes!

Users features

New search interface with advanced features

Thanks to the amazing work of Marcel Bolten, the search page has been entirely revamped and improved.

search page

It allows an advanced search query with custom syntax like AND, OR and parenthesis.

New notifications system with both email and web notifications

bell-notif

Admin features

  • New Export menu from Admin panel to generate zip, pdf or csv export from experiments, database or scheduler.
  • When an event is deleted from the scheduler, Admins get a notification.

Sysadmin features

Going full Docker

One important point is the complete drop for non-Docker installations. You can read more about the reasons on this page. But it boils down to: it’s creating problems that have already been solved by containerization technology.

So if you’re still not running on a Dockerized install, now would be a good time to transform your install in a Docker one, see documentation.

Going full utf8

With the requirement of MySQL version 8 comes also complete multibyte UTF-8 support, meaning emojis can be added, how cool is that? 🦖

S3 storage for uploads

Uploaded files by users can now be stored on an S3 compatible endpoint.

Conclusion

I would like to thank all the people that contributed to the code, opened issues and tested this new release.

Special thanks to the sponsors and to Marcel Bolten for his continuous quality contributions!

Now go upgrade your instance and if you’re not the sysadmin, ask your sysadmin to upgrade to benefit from these new features and all the bugfixes!