github lfnovo/open-notebook v1.15.0
v1.15.0 — Quiet Green, new providers and sturdier ingestion
on GitHub

2 hours ago

We recommend all users upgrade. v1.15.0 brings the new "Quiet Green" visual identity, three new provider options (SiliconFlow, Z.ai, MiniMax text-to-speech), and the latest Esperanto, content-core and podcast-creator releases. Behind them is a long list of fixes to failures that used to be silent: podcasts that never appeared, sources stuck as "Processing...", workers that stalled, answers cut short. Validated through the full release process: backend and frontend suites, a fresh-install and an upgrade-from-1.14.0 test against the published images, and an end-to-end pass over the running app (API and UI), including podcasts on OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini and DeepSeek.

🔒 Security

  • Credential encryption now uses PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA256 (600k iterations) with versioned ciphertext. New keys are written in the new pbkdf2v1: format, and existing keys keep decrypting. A one-shot POST /api/credentials/migrate-encryption upgrades stored keys (idempotent, fail-closed per record). See the downgrade note below (#1317, #1360)
  • Dependency security update: next 16.3.8 (critical RCE advisory in next/og; Open Notebook doesn't use next/og), axios, postcss, brace-expansion, and Python anyio, pyjwt, tornado, urllib3, virtualenv. Security floors are now pinned so a future lock can't resolve back to vulnerable versions (#1404, #1414)
  • The pillow override is gone: podcast-creator no longer pulls in moviepy, and content-core now requires pillow >= 12.3.0 itself (#1440)

✨ New features

  • "Quiet Green" visual identity. A new design foundation co-designed with the community in Discussion #1202 (a token system for color, type, radius and shadow; Bricolage Grotesque, Instrument Sans and Spline Sans Mono), applied screen by screen: app shell, notebook workspace, sources library, dialogs, models, settings, podcasts and search. Works in light and dark themes (#1202)
  • New providers: SiliconFlow (hosted DeepSeek, Qwen, GLM and Kimi; mainland-China accounts set the credential's Base URL to https://api.siliconflow.cn/v1) and Z.ai (the GLM family), both with connection test and model discovery (#1409, #1437)
  • MiniMax text-to-speech. MiniMax voices can now be used in podcast speaker profiles (speech-2.8-hd, speech-2.8-turbo), and MiniMax moves to MiniMax-M3 with a 1M-token context. Region-specific keys can set MINIMAX_BASE_URL / the credential Base URL (#1438)
  • OpenDocument uploads: .odt, .ods (one table per sheet) and .odp (one block per slide), plus .htm files (#1439)
  • YouTube when YouTube blocks your server: set CCORE_YOUTUBE_PROXY (a residential proxy) or CCORE_YOUTUBE_COOKIES_FILE (a browser cookies.txt) on the worker to get transcripts through. CCORE_AUDIO_SEGMENT_MINUTES controls how long audio is split before transcription (#1439)
  • Podcasts in your language again: episode profiles' language setting is honored for outlines and transcripts (#1334)
  • Podcasts sound more natural, with a short (~400 ms) pause between speaker turns, and audio combining no longer cuts off the end of a turn (#1446)
  • Podcast failures now explain themselves: a wrong speaker name, a voice the TTS model doesn't support, or a truncated response each get a specific hint (#1334)
  • The search page explains what text and vector search each cover; a "New Source" button sits on the empty sources state; the "API Keys" settings page is now "Models" (#1295, #1165, #1313)

🐛 Notable fixes

  • Podcasts work on a fresh install. The seeded speaker profiles ship without a voice model, and any unconfigured profile used to fail every podcast with validation errors for SpeakerConfig, even one generated with a fully configured profile (#1450)
  • Podcasts work with models that don't support JSON schema output (DeepSeek, older vLLM / llama.cpp servers). Outlines and transcripts use schema-validated output and fall back to plain JSON when an endpoint rejects it. Prompts no longer show the model a placeholder skeleton it could copy back, which used to abort episodes mid-generation (#1446, #1334)
  • Failed sources fail once, with a clear reason. An unreachable or missing page, a malformed URL, a corrupted file or a YouTube video without a transcript now fails on the first attempt with a specific message, instead of being retried up to 15 times (#1433)
  • The worker no longer stalls when a source or transformation is deleted before or while it's processed. Database failures are no longer misreported as "not found", so they stay retryable (#1363, #1364)
  • Context-length errors aren't retried for ~25 minutes in background jobs anymore; they fail immediately with an explanation (#1275)
  • Ask answers are no longer truncated. Its three stages were capped at 2000 output tokens; they now share the 8192 budget chat uses (#1221)
  • An empty model reply is an error, not an answer, in chat, source chat, Ask and transformations. A failed chat turn no longer leaves the question in the history, so retrying doesn't duplicate it (#1392)
  • Source chat: the streamed reply no longer repeats earlier answers, no longer drops or corrupts tokens across network chunks, and the context badge survives a page refresh (#1393, #1289)
  • Transformations no longer run on sources with no text and save an invented insight (#1394)
  • A partially failed embedding job no longer leaves a source looking embedded while search sees only part of it (#1390)
  • Vector search always returns results by descending similarity; text hits on insights open their parent source (#1306, #1339, #1345)
  • The YouTube transcript language preference in Settings is honored again (#1287)
  • Remote Crawl4AI servers that require a bearer token work again (CRAWL4AI_API_TOKEN) (#1269)
  • Clearing a notebook or transformation description now persists (#1396)
  • Passwords with non-ASCII characters work for API authentication (#1290)
  • Note editor follows the dark theme and shows list markers; long voice-model names no longer overflow profile cards; sidebar footer actions are aligned (#1294, #1300, #1259, #1288)
  • The Anthropic connection test no longer reports retired model ids as a permissions error (#1303)
  • ESPERANTO_SSL_* settings now apply to connection tests and model discovery (#1214)

⚠️ Behavior changes for self-hosters

  1. Model calls now time out after 180 seconds by default. Esperanto 2.28 enforces ESPERANTO_LLM_TIMEOUT on every provider. Before, most providers used their SDK default and Ollama waited indefinitely. If you run slow local models, raise it on the API and worker, e.g. ESPERANTO_LLM_TIMEOUT=420. Keep it under 600: the web UI gives up on a request after 10 minutes.
  2. Back up your database before migrating credential encryption. Versions before v1.15.0 can't read the new pbkdf2v1: format. Upgrading is safe (old keys keep working), but after you run the encryption migration, rolling back needs that backup.
  3. Podcast outline and transcript default to 8192 output tokens (were 3000 / 5000). If your outline or transcript model has a lower output limit (some older or local models stop at 4096), set the episode profile's Max output tokens below it.
  4. Sources that used to "complete" with empty content now fail. content-core 2.2 raises on extraction errors, so a page that couldn't be fetched shows up as a failed source with its reason instead of an empty one.
  5. API: a database failure while loading a single record returns 500, not 404, so clients can tell an outage from a missing record.
  6. API passwords must be sent as UTF-8. Clients that sent non-ASCII passwords as Latin-1 bytes need to switch.

🙏 Thanks

This release is mostly community work. Thank you:

And thanks to everyone who reported issues, shared logs and reproduced bugs. Many of the fixes above started with a precise report.

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