These release notes provide information for the 201804 EA release of Alfresco Community Edition.
This is the fifth Early Access release of Alfresco Community Edition containing the Alfresco Content Repository 6.0. This release contains all fixes completed from the release of Alfresco Content Services through March of 2018, including a number of fixes contributed by the open source community.
Care should be taken when upgrading from any previous version of Alfresco Community Edition. Before upgrading, test that you have a functional backup of your Alfresco Repository, and read the documentation.
Alfresco Community Edition is available both as a distribution zip file containing the war files and as docker images that are deployed using docker-compose.
The Alfresco Community Edition docker images are available on DockerHub.
To run this EA release with docker:
docker-compose.yml
file and the .env
file from this release tag. ATTENTION: Into the .env
file check that ALFRESCO_TAG=6.0.5-ea
. If not, change it accordingly.docker-compose up
Please refer to the "Docker-compose & Kubernetes" instructions on Github - acs-community-packaging for additional details. See also the notes below.
If you wish to run Alfresco Community Edition from plain war files, for instance to update an existing system, you can still download the distribution zip file from the Alfresco Community 201804 EA File List.
Notes:
The latest GA release of Alfresco Community Edition is available from the Alfresco Community Edition product page .
There are several architectural improvements in the 6.0 family of releases including library upgrades and a new deployment process based on Docker, Kubernetes, and Helm.
In addition to the various improvements we have made since the last release of Alfresco Community Edition, this release includes the third of our disruptive library upgrades which might impact compatibility with releases based on the Alfresco Content Repository 5.2.
The main goal of this release is to get feedback on our new deployment process. You can leave that feedback in comments on this page, or by Reporting an Issue. We are getting closer to a GA release of the 6.0 versions of the Content Repository. We expect that the next release will contain the final round of library upgrades and an updated release of Alfresco Share.
Please report issues with this release in the issue tracker. You can collaborate on this release by using the discussion tools in this social community. Other feedback can be provided by emailing community@alfresco.com.
The page dedicated to Alfresco Community Edition 6.0 lists all the features in the 6.0 line of Alfresco releases.
The source code for the packaging project that is used to create and run docker images and build the distribution zip can be found here.
This release comes with a set of docker images instead of a GUI installer. These docker images produce a deployment that is more closely aligned with production best practices than the previous installers were capable of creating. The docker-compose and helm charts can be found in a separate project acs-community-deployment and for this release the changes were tagged with 6.0.5-ea.
To configure Alfresco Community Edition, it is recommended to add -Dkey=value
properties to the JAVA_OPTS
environment variable in the docker-compose.yml file. In this EA release, all the data is still stored inside the docker containers. This is sufficient for test and development purposes. For production like environments however, it is recommended to mount locations on the host machine into the containers so that all the data (content store, DB and SOLR indexes) gets stored on the host.
No incremental updates since last Alfresco Community Edition 201803 EA Release when we began to send anonymous usage metrics to Alfresco through the heartbeat service. These metrics are sent every 24 hours and include: version information, numbers of users and groups, numbers of models, aspects and types, whether smart folders are enabled or not as well as the JVM total, max and free memory size. On the receiving side, we detect the country where the data is sent from, but we do not store the IP address of reports coming from our open source products.
Alfresco is using this data to better target new features and their prioritisation to actual usage patterns. We also track the adoption of new versions and features in our install base. To see exactly what is being sent, feel free to look at the log output generated by
log4j.logger.org.alfresco.heartbeat.datasender.internal.HBDataConsumer=DEBUG
If you wish to deactivate this data transmission, then you just need to add
heartbeat.enabled=false
to your configuration, either as value in alfresco-global.properties
or as part of the JAVA_OPTS
environment variable in the docker-compose
file.
FTP support is now disabled by default. Those who want to use it need to activate it manually. This produces a more secure default configuration.
CIFS support is now disabled by default. We recommend not using CIFS, as the protocol has been deprecated by Microsoft due to security vulnerabilities. We expect to remove support for CIFS in the future.
No incremental updates since last Alfresco Community Edition 201803 EA Release.
REST API Explorer
An updated release of the REST API Explorer (v6.0.4-ea) is available on Github - alfresco-rest-api-explorer to navigate the details of the new REST API endpoints. This is included in the SDK, or can be installed by adding the WAR to your Alfresco install and configuring CORS.
See also Alfresco public REST APIs to find links to more information about the new REST APIs.
No incremental updates since last Alfresco Community Edition 201803 EA Release.
No incremental updates since Alfresco Community Edition 201802 EA Release.
The latest version of the RM module (2.7.a) has been tested against Alfresco Content Repository 5.2.g and Share 5.2.f, but there are no known incompatibilities with the Alfresco Content Repository 6.0.a. Please report an issue if you find any problems. Additional details are available in the release blog post: Records Management 2.7.a.
The upcoming version RM 3.0 will have full compatibility with Alfresco Content Repository 6.0.
No incremental updates since Alfresco Community Edition 201702 GA Release.
The Alfresco SDK is not yet updated with the new code locations. For more details, see More of Alfresco Content Services on GitHub. The support for 6.0.x-ea versions in Alfresco SDK will be added in next releases of Alfresco SDK.
The documentation has been refreshed for this release. The documentation is currently published at docs.alfresco.com: Alfresco Community Edition
This release includes: French, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Dutch, Norwegian (Bokmål), Russian, Brazilian Portuguese and Simplified Chinese versions.
No new features have been removed in this specific release.
In this family of releases, the following features were deprecated and are disabled by default:
A number of features are considered deprecated and will be removed in a future release:
More information is available in https://community.alfresco.com/community/ecm/blog/2018/01/03/architecture-changes-for-alfresco-conte...
3rd Party Components installed in the docker containers:
Additional docker containers used in docker-compose file:
alfresco-content-services-community-full-distribution-6.0.5-ea.zip
alfresco-file-transfer-receiver-6.2.zip
alfresco-search-services-1.1.1.zip
You should use the same versions as we have in the docker containers (see above).
The issues addressed specifically in this release are available in JIRA projects for the components of this release. Please look at the previous 6.0 releases to get a complete list of issues addressed since the previous GA release (Alfresco Community Edition 201707 GA Release). Note that JIRA behaves inconsistently with these queries when you are not logged in.
Please refer to the Alfresco issue tracker for other known issues in this release.