Version 4.2

Released: February 12, 2022

Status: Stable

Changes

Authentication

The authentication app was refactored to add several major changes. The first major change was adding support for multi factor authentication. The implementation builds on top of Django’s authentication code to provide a secure but at the same time extensible framework with features such as unlimited number of authentication factors and forms for login.

With the addition of multi factor authentication, it was possible to add two step authentication using time based one time password (TOTP) was added. This implementation works in a very similar as most implementations where a random secret is generated and presented as a QR code that is scanned using mobile apps or hardware tokens. During the next login, a token representing the secret will be required to complete the login process.

TOTP authentication can be disabled at anytime either by the user or by an administrator. This can be done via the user interface or via new management commands.

These commands are:

  • authentication_otp_disable disable OTP authentication for a user

  • authentication_otp_initialize initialize the OTP state data for all users. This command is for debuging and maintenance in case the database migration does not correctly initialize the OTP state data for existing users.

  • authentication_otp_status display the OTP status of a user

The new authentication app allows for the easy creation of authentication workflows via backends. These are classes passed via the setting AUTHENTICATION_BACKEND, which must be the dotted path to the backend used to process user authentication and AUTHENTICATION_BACKEND_ARGUMENTS which is an optional YAML structure to pass to the authentication backend.

The authentication backends are able to control and customize the entire login process, including the forms presented to the user. Authentication backends can use mixins and can be subclassed to mix and expand their capabilities.

Included authentication mixins: - AuthenticationBackendRememberMeMixin

Included authentication backends: - AuthenticationBackendModelDjangoDefault - AuthenticationBackendModelEmailPassword - AuthenticationBackendModelUsernamePassword

Apps define authentication backends in the module authentication_backends.py.

With this new system the old EmailAuthBackend authentication class is removed. The same function is now accomplished by the AuthenticationBackendModelEmailPassword backend.

To enable TOTP authentication, set AUTHENTICATION_BACKEND to mayan.apps.authentication_otp.authentication_backends.AuthenticationBackendModelUsernamePasswordTOTP for username and TOTP login. For email and TOTP logins use mayan.apps.authentication_otp.authentication_backends.AuthenticationBackendModelEmailPasswordTOTP.

Dependencies

Django 2.2 is approaching end of life status, as such this version used Django 3.2 with the next LTS release and will be supported until 2024.

Other packages were updated:

  • django-widget-tweaks from version 1.4.8 to 1.4.9.

  • psycopg2 from version 2.8.6 to 2.9.2.

  • redis client from version 3.5.3 to 4.0.2.

The default version of PostgreSQL is now 12.9. Follow the required database procedure to migrate your data from the existing version to the new default version. This process requires creating a dump of your existing data and then importing it to the new version.

Docker

The .env and env_file were unified as a single .env file. Ensure you copy any custom changes your existing env_file before updating your deployment.

The internal Docker network used for the deployment was renamed from bridge to mayan. This helps differentiate the network now that multiple networks are supported.

The Docker Compose was moved from Debian 10 slim to Debian 11 slim. The build image was moved from Python 3.8-slim to Python 3.11-slim.

The command run_initialsetup_or_performupgrade was added to facilitate installations and upgrades in custom Docker deployments.

The default Docker Compose was updated to support more customization. The Redis container is now controlled by its own profile, this allows using external Redis servers is desired.

The deployment now defaults to using RabbitMQ a the message broker.

The RabbitMQ image tag was changed from 3.9-alpine to 3.9-management-alpine. This image includes the management plugins which aid in debugging and optimization of custom deployments.

The Traefik configuration was improved and supports more options. Additionally, the Traefik profile now runs in its own Docker network.

A Docker Compose password randomizer script is now available.

The necessary LDAP libraries and Python modules are now included in the default Docker image. User wanting to use LDAP still need to create a custom settings file but do not need to install the LDAP libraries or worry about dependency conflicts anymore.

Error logging

The error logger now includes a global error log list view in the tool menu. This view will display error log messages for all objects in the system that have been converted to the unified error logger.

Mailing

The events “mailing profile created” and “mailing profile edited” were added, enable as workflow triggers and for subscription.

Metadata

A regular expression metadata validator and parser were addeed. These offer unlimited verification of user input and transformation of user input.

Support for passing arguments to the metadata validators and parsers was added.

The model field used to store the path to the parser and validator was extended to 224 characters.

MIME types

Support for MIME type detection backends was added. This feature allows customizing the MIME type detection. Additionally, arguments can be passed to the MIME type backends for things like hardcoding file magic numbers for esoteric file types.

The previous MIME type detection code which used the Python Magic library is now the default backend.

In addition to the default backend two new backends were added:

  • PERL mimetype backend.

  • Linux file command line binary backend.

REST API

The batch API feature was updated to add support for binary content. Binary content is now returned in the response as a base64 encoded string.

Support for dynamic field API serialization was added. This feature allows specifying which fields are to be included in the response. This can be done by specifying which fields to include or which to exclude.

To support dynamic API fields, two URL query keys were added. These keys are _fields_only and _fields_exclude. Nested objects are supported using the double underscore (__) separator.

The serialized first page of each document version and document file is now included in the serialized document object. This helps reduce API requests when attempting to display document thumbnails via the API.

For objects that are children objects, the parent object IDs are now added to the serializer. The layout is {parent object name}_id. A few objects already provided the parent ID but with a different schema. These objects also now have the parent ID field with the new schema even if it displays a duplicate value. The old ID field is now deprecated and will be removed in version 5.0.

Sources

The sources that provide thumbnails now do so using the unified image serving code from the converter app. In addition to reducing duplicated code, the sources app also benefits from the improvements in image serving from the converter app like the adoption of StreamingHttpResponse to serve previews as streamed responses and allowing showing previews for office documents in the staging folders.

Support was added for inclusion and exclusion regular expressions for watch folders.

Storage

Two new settings were added to allow controlling the interval at which expired download files and shared uploaded files are cleaned up. These are:

  • DOWNLOAD_FILE_EXPIRATION_INTERVAL which defaults to 2 days.

  • SHARED_UPLOADED_FILE_EXPIRATION_INTERVAL which defaults to 7 days.

User interface

All user menu entries were reorganized to be located under a “User details” link.

Support was added for editing the locale profile of users as well as the theme settings.

Internally, the views for users, current users and superusers were unified resulting in a reduction of code, easier maintenance, and made the user view easier to extend.

New user events named “User theme edited” and “User locale profile edited” were added events.

Workflows

The workflow template transitions were exposed via the API.

Support was added for launching workflows from the API.

A small change was made to the workflow template permissions to require the view permission instead of the edit permission when attempting to view child objects of a workflow template.

The workflow state now has a column displaying all created actions labels separated by a comma.

Other

  • Hide all links that depend on users being authenticated.

  • Refactor ResolverRelatedManager.

  • Reduce the Sentry client default traces_sample_rate from 0.25 to 0.05.

  • Move the parse_range utility from the documents app to the common app.

  • Move SQLite check to the databases app.

  • Add Elasticsearch test container makefile targets.

  • Added the mailing profile created and edited events.

  • Update the Django debug view CSS and layout to match Django’s original appearance.

  • Support Django debug JavaScript code.

  • Minor CSS optimization to the Django debug view.

  • Switch all standalone containers to use a prefetch-multiplier of 1.

  • Move Docker templates to their own folder.

  • Move the docker-dockerfile-update target to the Docker makefile.

  • Error log partitions now link to their underline object via content type too.

  • Error log partitions are now retrieve or created on demand.

  • Added cascade permission support to error log partitions and entries.

  • Events app updates:

    • Use the correct attribute for fetching event types. Use id instead of name.

    • Cache the event type instance in the StoredEvent model.

    • An incorrect event type ID will now return a KeyError instead of masking the exception and returning an error message. It is now up to the calling code which action to take when the event type ID is not correct.

    • The previous unknown event error message is now available as a literal named literals.TEXT_UNKNOWN_EVENT_ID.

  • Update the ObjectActionAPIView view to allow passing extra context to serializers.

  • Don’t display API URL links to indexing instance and template parents that are also root nodes as these are not accessible.

  • Register more models using DynamicSerializerField to display the canonical serializer of the model when referenced by other objects.

  • Search updates:

    • Ensure all test models are deleted, including intermediate many to many models created automatically.

    • Update DetailForm usage for the new interface.

    • Move flatten_list to the common app.

    • ResolverPipeline updates:

      • Support resolver_extra_kwargs.

      • Add queryset exclusion support to ResolverRelatedManager.

    • Update related field resolution using pure Django

    • Solve all search indexing edge cases.

    • Models are indexed using smaller tasks to improve scalability.

    • Refactor ResolverRelatedManager. Use Django’s internal get_fields_from_path for related field introspection. Support more related field cases.

    • Trigger indexing on related model changes

    • Fix lock manager management command test.

    • Don’t index None values in lists.

    • Unify the search test mixins.

    • Use TemporaryDirectory for test search backend. Do automatic clean up of the temporary index directory.

    • Remove the separate related model index signal handlers.

    • Support reverse many to many indexing.

    • Add indexing optimizations.

    • Rename methods for clarity.

    • Move the any_to_bool function to the common app.

    • Support initializing the search backends.

    • Add method to reset backends.

    • Moved get_resolved_field_map and get_search_model_fields to the SearchBackend class.

    • Normalize true values for scope 0 match_all.

    • Added a new task task_reindex_backend to abstract backend reindexing.

    • Add constant maximum retries value to the task_deindex_instance and task_index_instance tasks.

    • Add ranged search model indexing.

    • Support backend initialization, reset, and tear down.

    • Automatically add the id field as a search field for all search models.

    • Separate backend initialization from app initialization.

    • Retry Whoosh LockErrors by encapsulating then in the general app exception DynamicSearchRetry.

  • File staging sources updates:

    • Fix extra brackets in the encoded and cached filenames.

    • Use context manager to ensure preview images are always closed.

Removals

  • None

Upgrade process

Docker Compose

Check the Docker upgrading chapter for the complete upgrade process.

Backward incompatible changes

  • Renaming of the mimetype app to mime_types.

  • Removal of the .api.get_mimetype function. The process now requires instantiating the configured MIME type backend and calling the get_mime_type method:

    from mayan.apps.mime_types.classes import MIMETypeBackend
MIMETypeBackend.get_backend_instance().get_mime_type(...)

  • Search model names are now specified in lower case in the user interface URL or in the search API URL.

Issues closed