Hello everyone,
v3.1.5 is out.
This release brings optional notifications to DockFlare, introduces a safe and durable way to decommission Agents, and includes a lot of lifecycle, protocol, and security hardening.
v3.1.5 has been cooking for quite a while. The upodate touches Docker events, Agent sessions, tunnel ownership, Cloudflare cleanup, encrypted configuration, and third-party notification delivery. With so many connected parts involved, testing was more extensive than usual. I wanted to exercise every workflow properly before calling the release ready.
Highlights
- Optional notifications powered by Apprise
- Direct support for Discord webhooks and many other destinations
- Notification categories you can enable individually
- Clear notification formatting with clickable service links
- Safe and restart-resistant Agent decommissioning
- Agent enrollment, health, tunnel, and decommission lifecycle alerts
- Optional Access Policy creation, update, and deletion alerts
- Reliable handling of UI-overridden Docker and Agent rules
- Hardened Agent sessions, reporting, and event processing
- Overview API security and read-only behavior improvements
- Frontend dependency refresh
What’s New
Notifications Powered by Apprise
DockFlare now includes optional notification support powered by [Apprise](https://github.com/caronc/apprise), an independent third-party open-source notification framework.
Notifications are entirely opt-in and remain disabled until you enable them under Settings > Notifications. If you do not want notifications, nothing changes for your existing DockFlare installation.
Apprise is already bundled inside DockFlare, so you do not need to install or run another Apprise service. For Discord, you can simply copy the webhook URL from Discord and paste it directly into DockFlare.
You can also configure Telegram, Slack, email, generic webhooks, and many other destinations supported by Apprise. If you already operate a separate Apprise API, DockFlare can connect to that as well, but doing so is completely optional.
You can receive notifications for:
- Rule activation, restoration, pending deletion, and final deletion
- Cloudflare tunnel, DNS, and Access failures
- Docker listener failures
- Agent enrollment success and failure
- Agent online and offline transitions
- Agent decommission start, completion, failure, and timeout
- Tunnel down and recovery transitions
- Access Policy creation, update, and deletion
The event controls are grouped by area, so you can decide exactly what DockFlare should send. Routine administrative events remain opt-in, while recommended failure and terminal lifecycle events are preselected when you first enable notifications.
Messages include useful context about Agents, tunnels, containers, Access Policies, managed rules, operations, and affected services. They can also include a link to your DockFlare dashboard.
Public service hostnames are formatted as clickable HTTPS links where supported, making it easy to open an affected service directly from Discord.
Notification destinations can contain webhook tokens and other credentials. DockFlare stores them inside its encrypted configuration, never displays the complete saved destination again, and removes sensitive details from status responses and logs.
A special thank you to [@simmons777](https://github.com/simmons777) for proposing flexible notification support through Apprise in [#302].
You can find complete notification and Discord setup guides in DockFlare’s internal Help Center. The guides are currently available in English. If you would like to help translate them, community PRs are very welcome.
Safe Agent Decommissioning
Agent removal is now a safe, coordinated process. DockFlare stops the Agent and its managed tunnel, removes rules and Cloudflare resources that belong exclusively to it, revokes its API key, and prevents accidental re-enrollment.
Shared and adopted tunnels are preserved. The workflow also survives Master or Agent restarts, and progress can be followed or retried from the Agents page.
For safety, DockFlare stops remote containers but does not delete Docker resources automatically. After decommissioning, it provides cleanup commands for you to review and run on the Agent host.
Expected Agent-offline and tunnel-down notifications are suppressed during decommissioning, so planned maintenance is not reported as an unexpected outage.
Thank you to [@henryxrl](https://github.com/henryxrl) for reporting the stale Agent and Cloudflare cleanup problem in [#378]
Fixed
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UI-overridden container lifecycle: Docker and Agent-managed rules now survive container recreation without losing UI-controlled routing, origin, tunnel, or Access settings. Pending routes also remain available throughout their configured grace period. Thank you to [@essentrix83](https://github.com/essentrix83) for the detailed report in [#388].
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Agent reporting: Agent sessions, event ordering, inventory validation, reconnect behavior, stale-event handling, and Docker event normalization have all been hardened.
-
Overview API security: Overview responses no longer include unnecessary credentials or sensitive operational data. The overview endpoint is read-only again and no longer changes or persists state.
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Dependencies: Compatible PostCSS, Axios, DOMPurify, Vue, and related transitive packages have been refreshed.
For the full technical breakdown, please see the [changelog](https://github.com/ChrispyBacon-dev/DockFlare/blob/stable/CHANGELOG.md).
Community Thanks
This release was shaped directly by community reports, ideas, and testing.
A big thank you to:
- [@simmons777](https://github.com/simmons777) for proposing Apprise notification support in [#302]
- [@henryxrl](https://github.com/henryxrl) for reporting incomplete Agent and Cloudflare cleanup in [#378]
- [@essentrix83](https://github.com/essentrix83) for the detailed UI-overridden lifecycle report in [#388]
Thank you as well to everyone who shared notification use cases, observability ideas, lifecycle feedback, and testing input.
The original notification request grew into configurable coverage for rules, Agents, tunnels, decommission operations, failures, and Access Policies because of your input.
Testing
The v3.1.5 work was covered by three substantial UAT tracks:
- 24 UI override and lifecycle scenarios with 85 test actions
- 12 Agent decommissioning scenarios with 27 test actions
- 10 Apprise notification scenarios with 35 test actions
That comes to 46 documented UAT scenarios and 147 individual test actions.
The UAT started with automated coverage, but I completed the final phase with hands-on manual screening and testing in a real-world deployment.
Before You Update
Update the DockFlare Master first.
Once the Master is updated, pull the latest DockFlare Agent image and recreate every Agent using the latest Agent Compose configuration.
Updating the Agents is important. The latest Agent version is required for complete decommissioning, tombstone handling, self-stop support, and the new Agent lifecycle behavior.
Notifications are optional, powered by the third-party Apprise project, and disabled by default. Your existing installation will continue operating normally if you do not configure them.
For safety, remote Agent cleanup remains stop-only. Removing containers, volumes, and other resources from the Agent host still requires your explicit action.
Happy tunnelling,
Christian