This is the first Release Candidate for Cells V3. As it names implies, this is not ready for production yet!
It brings many new features, but intensive testing should focus on the new datasource format, as well as performing upgrades from previous versions.
New Datasource Format
A new datasource format is introduced, that keeps the tree structure only in Cells internal indexes, and stores files as a flat structure inside the storage. This is more inline with "object storage" design, and brings huge performance gains as no more synchronization is required to maintain these indexes. This is now the preferred format, unless a direct access to the files inside the storage is necessary.
Notes
- Existing datasources (where data is stored as structured files and folders) are not modified. Tooling is provided for migrating format between structured and flat, as well as for dumping a snapshot of the index directly inside the storage, enabling easy restoration of a flat datasource.
- Internal buckets (used for storing thumbnails and versions) are now using this new format : this provides much more flexibility to the versioning feature, as these locations now appear as standard datasources.
👉 Read more about "Flat" datasources in the up-coming documentation page (WIP).
Other features (more info to come)
UX, Metadata, Search
- Tons of bugfixes and small improvements in all parts of the GUI. JavaScript is now built on top of React 17!
- Files presentation now offer a new "Gallery" view that is perfect for displaying folders of photos ("masonry layout"). The search results interface has been fully redesigned, the chat view was improved, including an experimental support for video calls.
- Many new metadata types are added, providing nice fields for boolean, dates, integers, progress bars, etc... They are indexed and searchable and can be used in Cells Flows as well.
Perfs & provisioning
- Single-node deployments do not start a NATS server anymore, all communications being transferred directly in-memory for the main process, and via gRPC for fork processes.
- Focus has been put on providing housekeeping commands for logs and activities and overall CPU and RAM consumption are lower.
- Installation can be more easily automatized with support of new fields in YAML/JSON configs.
- S3 (and compatible) support is improved and Cells S3 gateway (exposing Cells files as an S3-compatible storage) was made more vanila with the support of listBuckets and better Content-Type extraction.
Change log
You can find a summary of the change log here.