I’ve been using applications in Electric Eel for a while now and have consistently received updates for most of my apps without any issues. However, I’ve noticed that the changelog section remains blank every time an update occurs.
Questions:
Future Plans: Is there an intention to include changelog details in upcoming updates?
Alternative Methods: Is there another reliable way to view what changes have been made between versions?
I’ve reviewed the apps repository but haven’t found an effective method to track the changes between different versions. Any insights or suggestions on how to access this information would be greatly appreciated.
I’m referring to updates for Docker Compose applications. The UI notifies you that there is an available update, and the update modal has an expander for changelog, but from what I have seen, it is always blank.
I’ve never seen any changelog for any app update in EE. I don’t think they bother filling in that info. It’s one of the reasons I gave up on the community apps: they just don’t bother saying what these updates are for. Most of the updates aren’t even from the upstream app, they’re by whoever’s maintaining the community app, and the update frequently breaks things (such as by changing bind mounts for no reason). I finally got fed up with it all, installed Dockge, and installed my apps there with docker-compose.
Very possible the container isn’t being updated, the iX docker repo is still heavily templated and it might be something else repo related that changed.
If you’re talking about custom docker compose yaml, how would the app UI know what’s changed? Not all dockerhub projects are going to have that info for :latest tag.
Yeah, I dont expect to see changelogs for custom docker compose yaml’s, but I am surprised to have never seen a changelog on any of the official app updates.
I have noticed that the version numbers are two parts, the version of the upstream image, and the internal TrueNAS version number. I’ve seen updates to both, and haven’t yet seen any changelogs, which is a bit disappointing.
Its also pretty common to updates to ALL of the apps at once, and usually those just bump the internal version number. I expect those are changes to the iX docker repo, and shouldn’t change any functionality, but again, no changelogs.
I honestly don’t think I’ve even hit the + button to expand on updates in the 2 years I’ve run Scale. In theory they could add links to the release notes as hooks, but I’m not sure iX would spend the time on such a feature. I don’t even know if Portainer does.
This is what I’ve noticed too. While I was trying to make the official apps, that internal TrueNAS version number would change very, very frequently (while the upstream almost always stayed the same), yet there was never any changelog. Worse, these updates were frequently breaking things, because the maintainer apparently wanted to change the internal mount paths, which broke my configuration. Among many reasons, this is why I gave up on the official apps. They appear to be maintained by amateurs who aren’t treating them seriously.
Have you had those issues on Electric Eel? I’ve heard a lot of similar things about apps on previous versions of Scale that were using Kubernetes, and my understanding is that things are a lot more stable with Docker Compose on Electric Eel.
I’m pretty new to TrueNAS, and have only used EE, but I haven’t had issues yet.
If you’re using the catalog apps, you’re not only relying on upstream images from projects to be bug free, but also on volunteers not making mistakes in the templates or other issues from other parts of the repo.
If you use your own compose apps (through the custom yaml in the app ui, CLI, portainer/dockge etc) you only have to worry about issues with whatever image you choose for an app.
That’s a fair point. I do like being able to manage them from the TrueNAS apps page. I don’t particularly want to switch to using Dockge or Portainer. I might switch to using custom YAML, though I am hoping that in Fangtooth there are more options for managing YAML based containers to reach feature parity with the apps from the catalog.
(icons, web UI button, etc)
You can already do custom icons and web UI, but you need to edit a file for each app then force the middleware to refresh (usually updating the compose yaml). There is a feature request to have something more simple added.
Nothing stopping you from dipping your toes into custom compose apps now. I have to stop being lazy and moving all my apps over. But since things aren’t broken
Still happens. Today every app had and update and none of them have any explanation. I expected to at least find a link to the github repository where this app is defined and then I could read the changes for myself, but even that is missing. Bonus points if the link pointed at the commit currently running and the commit to be installed.
I’ve installed every beta release like a good system admin, and after all this time I’ve never seen anything in the app changelogs so stopped checking.
Now 90% of my apps are custom apps either through the UI or YAML. I like having full control over the apps and knowing what’why for updates.
You can set an icon by modifying /mnt/.ix-apps/app-configs/[app name]/metadata.yaml (if I remembered the path right). Unfortunately, there was an ‘update’ to custom apps yesterday that wiped all my carefully-chosen icons. I will wait until they add a field for icons to the custom app before doing it again…
All my icons and webportals for custom compose apps are still there.
It would be nice if the community catalog apps would add changelogs, but that’s done by volunteers. Even a link to the changelog for the image build would be nice. Honestly would expect the official iX apps to have them, even if it’s an update that’s triggered by some other template change.
No, I did nothing more than update the UI “custom app,” which updates the “custom app” app – not the docker image that the custom app runs. The update resets the metadata.yaml where you can specify a custom icon.
My yaml custom apps retained their custom icons.
Not a big deal. They’re only there for aesthetics, but I do hope they add a field where I can add a URI to an image.
