BookStack Project Update for September 2024

Dan Brown posted on the 12th of September 2024

Since we’ve gone a few months without an update I thought it’d be good to provide a post regarding project progress & other activities, so here’s what’s been going on over the last few months:

Patch Release

During its longer-than-usual lifetime BookStack v24.05 has received a few patch releases, with the latest being v24.05.4 which was a security release. Since the original v24.05 release, patches have fixed quite a few issues and included some significant translation updates so ensure you’re on the latest version for the best experience.

Development Progress

Development for the next release is ongoing. The focus has been on building a new editor, which I talked about in more depth in my 9-years post here. The code for this can be seen on GitHub here. Development has been on-and-off, with arthritis issues distracting my focus, or with diversions to put out new patch releases, but I’m currently back to making progress. My current target is on an early October date for the next feature release which would include an early alpha of the new editor. At some point soon I’ll start to look at pull-requests that have been made over the last few months which I haven’t had a chance to focus on, to provide opportunity for them to be merged for this next release.

(Partial) Migration to Codeberg

A while back I started thinking about moving away from GitHub for various reasons, many of which can be seen documented on this issue which I opened up for wider discussion with the community.

In July, a couple of things added fuel to this desire:

Access to download/upload files for our website repository was limited (without payment) due to hitting an LFS limit that we cannot control.
- Actions of public users count against this limit since it’s a public repository.
GitHub has started to introduce AI helpers for some input boxes, while I’m already finding it challenging to deal with AI use that users perform manually via issues/PRs.

With this I started a migration away for both my other personal projects, and for BookStack projects. For my personal private projects I set up a self-hosted Forgejo instance. For BookStack’s repos, and my other public projects, I chose Codeberg. You can find the migrated BookStack projects here.

Codeberg is a community-driven non-profit that respects privacy and has a focus on free and open source software. Generally speaking, projects on Codeberg need to be under a OSI/FSF approved license. Compared to GitHub, who’s Microsoft owned & chasing AI as fast as possible, a platform like Codeberg much closer aligns with the ideals of the BookStack project so it feels like a better home in general.

The core BookStack project repo has yet to make the jump though, since there are quite a few complications involved there, including how BookStack is primarily deployed via a direct download from GitHub. The move of the main repo will take time, and I may use this as an opportunity to make some significant changes to the deployment/distribution process.

Talking on Podcasts

Over the last few months I’ve chatted on a few podcasts. In June I sat down with Brodie Robertson on his Tech over Tea podcast:

We mostly talked about open source, but from about 1:28:23 we delve into BookStack to discuss some of the decisions made & challenges found while developing the project.

Then later in August Ethan Sholly, best know for his great “This Week in Self-Hosted” updates, invited me onto the Self-Host Cast:

During our discussion we talk about a range of things include the origins of BookStack, future plans & ideas, and the move to work on BookStack full time.

New Videos

I like to have video guides for our install scripts, so in July I put together a video guide for the Ubuntu 24.04 install script which we made available earlier in the year:

I also put together some videos on another channel of mine, where in I test some other open source self-hosted software where, in both, I use BookStack as an example: