Cells 2.2 is a significant backend-oriented release. Deployment has been simplified to the maximum and performance has been greatly improved.
Multiple URLs support with Sites
Cells now natively supports binding on multiple Sites. Each Site defines one or more Bind Addresses, a custom TLS configuration, and an optional External URL.
Without any configuration, Cells starts on 0.0.0.0:8080 with self-signed TLS certificate, and administrators can later on register new sites to bind the gateway to new URLs. This is a huge gain for networking flexibility and easier deployment. Install procedure, either in CLI or Browser mode, has been simplified to the max (JSON/YAML non-interactive install modes are also made simpler for automated provisioning).
Fig 1 - Example: local access, web-facing w/ let's Encrypt and behind a reverse proxy
Sites advanced features
- Each site provides a "Maintenance Mode" that temporarily prevents access to this endpoint (optionally including custom conditions to enable maintenance e.g. for all except one specific client IP).
- When multiple External URLs are defined, public links domain name can be forced to a specific value.
- [ED] Enable authentication connectors based on the accessed External URL.
- [ED] Enable workspaces or contents listings based on the accessed External URL with Security Policies.
Personal Access Token
Personal Access Token is a new authentication method allowing administrators to manually generate Access Tokens for any user, with a fixed expiration date. It can be used as a replacement to OAuth2 Client Credentials Flow, which is based on browser redirections and complex to implement in a fully automated environment. This makes Rest API consumption much easier.
Fig 2 - Example: Generating access token for "admin" user
New in Cells Enterprise
- SFTP Gateway : expose workspaces files through SFTP protocol.
- Search engine content extraction and indexation using Doconv or Apache Tika.
- Purge files/folder activities and other housekeeping tools.
- Advanced metadata support in Security Policies, e.g. filter listings based on tags.
- New Cells Connect "lightweight" version of Cells Enterprise containing Cells Home plus Directories/Single-Sign-On features.
- [Tech Preview] New Cells Flows tool brings workflow management and task management at a new level. Dedicated documentation is on the way.
Other improvements
- Configuration, microservices registry and other components where deeply reworked to improve RAM usage and CPU performance. Idle processes now use 0.2% of CPU!
- CLI commands and their documentation have been reorganized to be much more usable.
- Share links generation can be secured at API level, on a per-user/per-group/per-role pattern.
- Tons of UX glitches and improvements: home page search engine, disable update checks for servers without Internet access, etc.
- New languages added: Chinese Simplified, Vietnamese, Russian.
- Admin Guide has been revamped.
Upgrade
Upgrade is done by simply replacing the binary using the in-app upgrade tool.
Note that the "sites" feature changes the configuration format of legacy "url" and "urlInternal" parameters, but they will be migrated automatically.
Contributions
For this release, we got some help from the our great community:
Raphaël Droz provided a useful script to decrypt documents outside Cells in case of disaster recovery.
A special thanks to Listeng (Chinese Simplified), hieugem (Vietnamese) and Антон Скворцов & aznvkz (Russian) who have translated the major part of their language.
They have also helped with the translation in various languages (with no special order):
Samooo (Arabic), mayanqing48 and cloverliang (Chinese Simplified), JeffVH and brh (Dutch), 山口敦 (Japanese), Jio, zetyx Noel, FennecFoxSW, Jaejoon Jung, Kimcore, JellyBrick (Korean), Vilen, vladimirplakhot, Апархов Александр (Russian),
Fredrik Burmester (Swedish)