Note: this post is a work-in-progress!

Introduction

eLabFTW 6.0 is here (or maybe will be here if you are reading this before the final release)!

This is a major release, with a few breaking changes. Make sure to read our post explaining why we introduced breaking changes in this release.

This post is about the new features and the fixes issues that are contained in this new release.

A note about “stable” releases

eLabFTW is a living project — “stable” should not be taken to mean that it is no longer evolving. Version 6.0.0 is production-ready, but minor bugs will surface once it is in wide use, and patches will follow.

We target major releases every few months and issue patches as needed. A “.0” tag means the code and documentation are ready to deploy, but be sure to apply subsequent patch releases so your users are not left with already-fixed bugs.

See also our dedicated blog post about the eLabFTW release schedule.

New features and enhancements

Speed

This new version will definitely feel much faster. Not because we improved many different little things (we did though), but simply because of a one line change in how we build the JavaScript code served on the page. Going from “bundle everything into two big chunks”, to “make smart decisions about chunking” has had a HUGE impact. As you can see now, after loading the page, it is almost immediatly “functional”. Meaning we no longer have this little delay after page load before we can start clicking on elements and interacting with the page. That delay was due to that huge bundle of JavaScript which needed to be parsed by the browser at every page load. Now instead of loading 27 Mb of JS/CSS in 4 requests, we load 7.21 Mb in 2 requests. The rest is loaded on-demand, when needed. It would have been great to discover this sooner, but better late than never…

We also made improvements on the PHP/SQL side to improve queries and make the app lighter and faster. Our goal is for the application to be extremely fast and responsive, because that’s how we like our apps, especially the ones we use daily.

Better table view

If you list entries in table view, the table will now remember the size and order of columns. You can pin columns to the left and they will stay there.

New appearance page

You will find a new menu entry in the user menu: Appearance. This allows you to customize your interface a bit, by selecting from three different themes: Light, Dark and Midnight (new). You can also change the main primary color now!

Various upgrades and bugfixes

This release contains many bugfixes that we reported in issues, and also updates of libraries such as MathJax version 4 and many others.

For Sysadmins

You cannot upgrade to version 6.x without reading the upgrade documentation. A Discussion is also available so you can quickly ask a question or report an issue: Discussion about eLabFTW 6.0 on GitHub.

Main points:

• container must be deployed as user
• it listens on port 8080 internally
• chem-plugin is no longer necessary
• it should be deployed with a read-only filesystem and tmpfs
• volumes need to be adjusted

Make sure to read our post explaining why we introduced breaking changes in this release.

Conclusion

Thanks to everyone who contributed, directly or indirectly, to this release. Reporting issues on the bug tracker or in the chat is very valuable! Make sure to report any bug you might find, even the most minor one; it is always appreciated.

To report a bug, select “Submit feedback” from the top-right help menu:

The adventure continues!

• elabftw
• release