Cells v5 is our most ambitious release yet. It brings a redesigned content experience with the new Pages display and a completely revamped custom metadata system, alongside a big improvement to the microservices engine built for cloud and clustered deployments. From end-user collaboration to large-scale Kubernetes operations, every layer of the platform has been rethought.
What's new for users and editors
The new Pages display introduces a modernized browsing and authoring experience: default namespaces are installed on first run, the editor gains richer formatting and Table-of-Content hints, and the overall navigation has been refreshed to make publishing internal pages feel as natural as managing files.
Custom metadata has been rebuilt around a new Entity Values store, unlocking togglable fields, focus-based editing, popover tagging, validation flows on the info panel, and pre-filled schema defaults for personal team uploads. Combined with debounced search across text-based fields and expanded i18n coverage (German, French, Norwegian, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, Ukrainian), the day-to-day experience is faster, friendlier, and easier to tailor to each organization.
Pydio Cells 5.0 is built for the cloud
Under the hood, we've enhanced the v4 runtime with an update to the plugin-based microservices engine, now driven entirely by a single bootstrap.yaml configuration. Every infrastructure component — servers, brokers, queues, caches, config and storage backends — is initialized through a unified URL-scheme plugin system (grpc://, nats://, redis://, sql://, mongodb://, vault://, etcd://…), making it trivial to swap an embedded backend for a managed cloud service.
Cells v5 ships with a production-grade Helm chart designed around externally-managed backends. Every infrastructure dependency — MariaDB/PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, NATS, etcd, MinIO/S3, Vault — can now be configured as an external service, removing the internal coupling that previously tied the chart to bundled subcharts. The bundled subcharts are deprecated; production deployments are expected to point Cells at managed or operator-deployed services. A dedicated cells-controller service mediates Kubernetes ConfigMaps and Secrets at runtime.
Other Major Features
New PostgreSQL support
PostgreSQL joins MariaDB/MySQL as a fully supported primary database, with all idm/data/scheduler stores tested end-to-end and the migration framework adapted to PG-specific behavior (collation, column semantics, automigrate). The minimum DB versions, install docs and i18n strings have been refreshed accordingly.
Multi-tenancy support [ED]
Cells v5 introduces first-class multi-tenancy. Tenants are isolated at the configuration, data and identity layers, with a configurable tenant header to route requests across deployments.
Cloud-native clustering, fully rewritten
The Kubernetes and clustering layers have been rewritten from the ground up: stateless pods, externalized config and registry, replica-aware connectors for every backend, and a controller service to mediate cluster-wide state. With v5, every infrastructure dependency — database, document store, cache, broker, object storage, secrets — can be delegated to a managed or operator-deployed service, so Cells pods carry no internal state of their own. The Helm chart is now the recommended way to run Cells at scale.
Enterprise & Security [ED]
The Enterprise build adds LLM/OpenAI integration for AI-assisted features, a dryRun mode for the scheduler syncer, refined policy/ACL semantics (user UUIDs instead of logins, cross-node ACL references), and an additional S3 signature mode (signed + trailer) for broader SDK compatibility. On the security side, SameSite=Strict session cookies, read-authorization enforcement on Cells/Roles/Namespace endpoints, and blocking of unsafe forgot-password external links harden the platform out of the box.
Routing flexibility
Caddy and the Sites configuration have been decoupled from the main HTTP server mux. The gateway is now composable — you can run Caddy embedded, behind your own reverse proxy, or replace it entirely, while internal HTTP services keep running on their own dedicated mux.
Observability
End-to-end OpenTelemetry is built in: distributed traces, structured logs and metrics exported via OTLP, ready to plug into any modern observability stack.
Breaking Changes & Deprecation
- Reverse URL is now compulsory when running Cells behind a reverse proxy. The external URL must be configured explicitly — relying on implicit detection from incoming requests is no longer supported.
- Bundled Helm subcharts are deprecated. Production deployments must point Cells at external (managed or operator-deployed) services. Bundled charts remain only for local trials.
- GCS datasources removed, and structured datasources are now hidden behind an advanced configuration.
- Legacy config migrations deprecated — upgrades go through the new v4 → v5 migration framework (schemas, personal access tokens, policies, namespaces, metadata). Read the upgrade guide before you begin.
- Misc API changes: editor URL keys exposed on REST endpoints, presigned-URL flag on
/versions, expanded CheckFileInfo response in the WOPI/Collabora integration, and several smaller adjustments — see the API changelog.
Codebase
V5 is the result of two years of intensive engineering on top of the v4 stateless foundation. Highlights:
- New editor.bnote plugin for the Pages display functionality.
- New runtime manager with dynamic service composition driven by
bootstrap.yaml. - Storage layer rewritten on GORM with multi-database support.
- New broker and queue implementations: a file-system PubSub broker, and pluggable goqueue/debounce queues.
- Toolchain upgraded to Go 1.26, with updated Caddy, Hydra, Bleve and pgx dependencies.
Resources
- Upgrade Instructions: Must Read!
- Support: Forum
- Administration Guide: Quick Start
- Kubernetes Deployment: Helm Chart Guide
- Developer Docs: API, Knowledge Base
- Show your love: Star on Github or follow us on LinkedIn!
Contributions
This release ships with refreshed translations across German, French, Brazilian Portuguese and Japanese.
Norwegian and Ukrainian are on their way, thanks to our amazing Crowdin community.
If you want to help us and participate by adding translation to your language, it is really easy: just navigate to the Pydio Cells project in Crowdin, create an account and get started!
Change log
You can find a summary of the change log here.