Synapse 1.25.0 (2021-01-13)

Ending Support for Python 3.5 and Postgres 9.5

With this release, the Synapse team is announcing a formal deprecation policy for our platform dependencies, like Python and PostgreSQL:

All future releases of Synapse will follow the upstream end-of-life schedules.

Which means:

• This is the last release which guarantees support for Python 3.5.
• We will end support for PostgreSQL 9.5 early next month.
• We will end support for Python 3.6 and PostgreSQL 9.6 near the end of the year.

Crucially, this means we will not produce .deb packages for Debian 9 (Stretch) or Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial) beyond the transition period described below.

The website https://endoflife.date/ has convenient summaries of the support schedules for projects like Python and PostgreSQL.

If you are unable to upgrade your environment to a supported version of Python or Postgres, we encourage you to consider using the Synapse Docker images instead.

Transition Period

We will make a good faith attempt to avoid breaking compatibility in all releases through the end of March 2021. However, critical security vulnerabilities in dependencies or other unanticipated circumstances may arise which necessitate breaking compatibility earlier.

We intend to continue producing .deb packages for Debian 9 (Stretch) and Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial) through the transition period.

Removal warning

The old Purge Room API
and Shutdown Room API
are deprecated and will be removed in a future release. They will be replaced by the
Delete Room API.

POST /_synapse/admin/v1/rooms/<room_id>/delete replaces POST /_synapse/admin/v1/purge_room and
POST /_synapse/admin/v1/shutdown_room/<room_id>.

Bugfixes

• Fix HTTP proxy support when using a proxy that is on a blacklisted IP. Introduced in v1.25.0rc1. Contributed by @Bubu. (#9084)

Synapse 1.25.0rc1 (2021-01-06)

Features

• Add an admin API that lets server admins get power in rooms in which local users have power. (#8756)
• Add optional HTTP authentication to replication endpoints. (#8853)
• Improve the error messages printed as a result of configuration problems for extension modules. (#8874)
• Add the number of local devices to Room Details Admin API. Contributed by @dklimpel. (#8886)
• Add X-Robots-Tag header to stop web crawlers from indexing media. Contributed by Aaron Raimist. (#8887)
• Spam-checkers may now define their methods as async. (#8890)
• Add support for allowing users to pick their own user ID during a single-sign-on login. (#8897, #8900, #8911, #8938, #8941, #8942, #8951)
• Add an email.invite_client_location configuration option to send a web client location to the invite endpoint on the identity server which allows customisation of the email template. (#8930)
• The search term in the list room and list user Admin APIs is now treated as case-insensitive. (#8931)
• Apply an IP range blacklist to push and key revocation requests. (#8821, #8870, #8954)
• Add an option to allow re-use of user-interactive authentication sessions for a period of time. (#8970)
• Allow running the redact endpoint on workers. (#8994)

Bugfixes

• Fix bug where we might not correctly calculate the current state for rooms with multiple extremities. (#8827)
• Fix a long-standing bug in the register admin endpoint (/_synapse/admin/v1/register) when the mac field was not provided. The endpoint now properly returns a 400 error. Contributed by @edwargix. (#8837)
• Fix a long-standing bug on Synapse instances supporting Single-Sign-On, where users would be prompted to enter their password to confirm certain actions, even though they have not set a password. (#8858)
• Fix a longstanding bug where a 500 error would be returned if the Content-Length header was not provided to the upload media resource. (#8862)
• Add additional validation to pusher URLs to be compliant with the specification. (#8865)
• Fix the error code that is returned when a user tries to register on a homeserver on which new-user registration has been disabled. (#8867)
• Fix a bug where PUT /_synapse/admin/v2/users/<user_id> failed to create a new user when avatar_url is specified. Bug introduced in Synapse v1.9.0. (#8872)
• Fix a 500 error when attempting to preview an empty HTML file. (#8883)
• Fix occasional deadlock when handling SIGHUP. (#8918)
• Fix login API to not ratelimit application services that have ratelimiting disabled. (#8920)
• Fix bug where we ratelimited auto joining of rooms on registration (using auto_join_rooms config). (#8921)
• Fix a bug where deactivated users appeared in the user directory when their profile information was updated. (#8933, #8964)
• Fix bug introduced in Synapse v1.24.0 which would cause an exception on startup if both enabled and localdb_enabled were set to False in the password_config setting of the configuration file. (#8937)
• Fix a bug where 500 errors would be returned if the m.room_history_visibility event had invalid content. (#8945)
• Fix a bug causing common English words to not be considered for a user directory search. (#8959)
• Fix bug where application services couldn't register new ghost users if the server had reached its MAU limit. (#8962)
• Fix a long-standing bug where a m.image event without a url would cause errors on push. (#8965)
• Fix a small bug in v2 state resolution algorithm, which could also cause performance issues for rooms with large numbers of power levels. (#8971)
• Add validation to the sendToDevice API to raise a missing parameters error instead of a 500 error. (#8975)
• Add validation of group IDs to raise a 400 error instead of a 500 eror. (#8977)

Improved Documentation

• Fix the "Event persist rate" section of the included grafana dashboard by adding missing prometheus rules. (#8802)
• Combine related media admin API docs. (#8839)
• Fix an error in the documentation for the SAML username mapping provider. (#8873)
• Clarify comments around template directories in sample_config.yaml. (#8891)
• Move instructions for database setup, adjusted heading levels and improved syntax highlighting in INSTALL.md. Contributed by @fossterer. (#8987)
• Update the example value of group_creation_prefix in the sample configuration. (#8992)
• Link the Synapse developer room to the development section in the docs. (#9002)

Deprecations and Removals

• Deprecate Shutdown Room and Purge Room Admin APIs. (#8829)

Internal Changes

• Properly store the mapping of external ID to Matrix ID for CAS users. (#8856, #8958)
• Remove some unnecessary stubbing from unit tests. (#8861)
• Remove unused FakeResponse class from unit tests. (#8864)
• Pass room_id to get_auth_chain_difference. (#8879)
• Add type hints to push module. (#8880, #8882, #8901, #8940, #8943, #9020)
• Simplify logic for handling user-interactive-auth via single-sign-on servers. (#8881)
• Skip the SAML tests if the requirements (pysaml2 and xmlsec1) aren't available. (#8905)
• Fix multiarch docker image builds. (#8906)
• Don't publish latest docker image until all archs are built. (#8909)
• Various clean-ups to the structured logging and logging context code. (#8916, #8935)
• Automatically drop stale forward-extremities under some specific conditions. (#8929)
• Refactor test utilities for injecting HTTP requests. (#8946)
• Add a maximum size of 50 kilobytes to .well-known lookups. (#8950)
• Fix bug in generate_log_config script which made it write empty files. (#8952)
• Clean up tox.ini file; disable coverage checking for non-test runs. (#8963)
• Add type hints to the admin and room list handlers. (#8973)
• Add type hints to the receipts and user directory handlers. (#8976)
• Drop the unused local_invites table. (#8979)
• Add type hints to the base storage code. (#8980)
• Support using PyJWT v2.0.0 in the test suite. (#8986)
• Fix tests.federation.transport.RoomDirectoryFederationTests and ensure it runs in CI. (#8998)
• Add type hints to the crypto module. (#8999)