v6-RC-1 - Release Candidate

[snipe]

⚠️ IMPORTANT: This version of Snipe-IT REQUIRES PHP 7.4 or greater.

The long-awaited Release Candidate for Snipe-IT v6 is finally here! There were a lot of things that conspired against us for this to be so late (things like an ongoing global pandemic, Laravel delaying their release because of some unfortunate choices made by the PHP release managers, dependencies being trickier for the same reasons as Laravel was delayed, and so on) but here we are.

When develop and master start to diverge so much that it takes hours to reconcile merge conflicts, it's in everyone's best interests to push ahead with the release, even if it doesn't have every bell and whistle everyone wanted. We got a lot done for v6 - much of it is under the hood and our users won't notice (framework upgrades, security upgrades, etc), but we hope the stuff you can see will make it worth it for you. We did end up merging down a LOT of the v6 features (like G Suite Secure LDAP) back down into v5 so that you folks didn't have a wait. It makes the v6 release a little less dramatic, but we never believe in holding features back just for the sake of publicity.

As we've stated before, delays in releases for Snipe-IT don't mean the same things as they often do in other software projects, since we were still constantly releasing to the v5.x line while we were developing v6, so it's not as if nothing was moving forward and everyone was holding their breath for v6 just to see some kind of progress.

And likewise, once v6 is officially released, it doesn't mean we're not going to keep pushing forward as we always do. Like our increasing age, versions are just a number, and all the cool features we had hoped to get into v6 but couldn't will just be moved into the next version. Projects are either feature driven or date driven, they cannot be both. While we are normally feature-driven, that's because of our very fast release cycle.

We've been working on this for a long time (since about June 2021 when we broke the develop branch off from the normal v5 bloodline). We hope you'll consider testing out the RC versions so we can make sure the rollout is as smooth as possible. As ALWAYS, do not use release candidates in production.

Note: For consistency purposes, we'll be carrying this official v5 to v6 changelog below forward into the final release of v6.0.0 to save me the time of having to pull out save months worth of changes for each RC. :)

New in v6

Added

• Added PHP8 compatibility
• Restore from previous Snipe-IT backup added to web UI
• Added ability to upload asset images via API
• Add components and users count to dashboard
• Added dashboard module for locations [ch9199]
• Added asset restore to API
• Added reqestable as model bulk edit field
• Added stricter validation for slack hooks (people were trying to use non-slack urls for webhooks)
• Added additional fields to new user modal [Create new user account from asset form - additional fields #10421]
• Adding .my.cnf to disable column-statistics backup for Docker

Improved

• Tons of mobile and web UX/UI improvements [Features/improved mobile ux #10129]
• Optimized queries for faster loading
• Upgraded from Laravel 6 to Laravel 8
• Improved Remote User login: support Google Cloud IAP headers
• Improved S3 compatibility
• Upgraded to latest and created Font Awesome
• Exclude web.config from Apache
• Many improvements to localization, adding more translatable strings to the UI

Fixed

• TONS of bugfixes (too many to list)
• Improved Docker support
• Improved accessibility
• Reverted back to the old LDAP login and sync methods from AdLdap, which had caused more problems than it solved in the long run
• Fixed No Result when searching by Checked Out To with Advanced search at All Assets #8828: Can't search by checked out user in advanced search
• Fixed extraneous wildcard query in asset search [Fixed extraneous wildcard query in asset search #10514]

Removed

• Dropped support for PHP 7.3 (PHP 7.3 is already EOL, so you should have definitely upgraded anyway)

For a full list of changes, see the complete changelog. To see the details on the 260 merged PRs to develop since the release of v5, click here.

Upgrading

For general upgrading instructions, click here. Users who installed Snipe-IT via Git (recommended) can just run php upgrade.php.

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This discussion was created from the release v6-RC-1 - Release Candidate.

[matmair]

@snipe thanks for everything you and your team are doing here. Good stuff!

[iamkhris]

I'm running v5.3.7 originally installed via git. When I run "php upgrade.php" it seemingly goes through the motions but leaves me on V5.3.7. What am I missing?

[adagioajanes]

@iamkhris the php upgrade.php process defaults to the latest master release. This is still a release candidate, so it is not captured by that upgrade process by default.

I recommend making a copy of your production environment while testing this as well, rather than upgrading production just yet. This is still a release candidate, so there may be a few quality items to address first.

[iamkhris]

Gotcha. Thank you. :)

[snipe]

Once you have a production copy that you can mess up while testing, you can use php upgrade.php develop and it will pull the latest from the develop branch, which is what the RC is based off of.

[cswinton147]

great work on getting a new release out (later than expected or not) during a pandemic. can't wait to try this.

[bunzladi]

If you working with PHP 7.4.13 you must activate the PHP Sodium Extension.
You have to go to the PHP.ini file and at the very bottom add the "extension=php_sodium.dll" to the list. Otherwise your Snipe IT will be down and you will not be able to downgrade or upgrade it.
But otherwise everything worked well.

[rfrost]

Oracle Linux Users

If you are running Oracle Linux 7.x ( or 8 ) with Oracle's mirrored EPEL you cannot install the Sodium library because the php-pecl-sodium RPM is out of date and dependent on Version 5 of php. So the workaround is to compile your own PECL sodium library and the steps are as follows:

NOTE: sodium.so file for PHP needs to be compiled with PECL. But this process requires EPEL.
NOTE: Sodium is from EPEL. Enable Oracle's Mirrored EPEL, install build tools needed for compiling extensions

yum -y install epel-release
yum -y groupinstall "Development Tools"
yum -y install libsodium libsodium-devel
pecl install libsodium

Then add the "extension=sodium.dll/sodium.so" to the PHP.ini file

Check that the sodium module is loaded by searching for it by running "php -m" to enumerate the PHP module list

Then proceed to do the normal php upgrade