X-Road is currently using Vue 2 as the web frontend framework for both the Security Server and new Central Server. Alongside Vue, we also use a few additional frameworks that are closely related to the main framework:
Vuetify for the components
Vue-router for the client-side routing
Vee-validate for validation tasks
Webpack based build system
Vue 3 has been out for a bit over a year already, but unfortunately we have not been able to upgrade until now due to one of the frameworks (Vuetify) not reaching compatibility with our required components until February of this year. Vue 2 is currently scheduled to be deprecateted in December of this year. This means that the version we are using will not receive any updates after that.
We should aim to replace Vue 2 with Vue 3 by version 7.4.0, however since all of the related frameworks also need to be migrated and the build system needs to move to Vite, the process itself is not trivial. On the new Central Server we use a new testing framework and the test coverage there is quite good, however on the Security Server the tests are a bit less effective. This means that in order to do the changes more confidently, it would also be good to first migrate the Security Server tests to the new framework. Luckily the test migration is not as difficult as the frontend migrations themselves.
The X-Road Working Group has decided that the change will be implemented in the following order:
We start with upgrading the Central Server framework.
Next we migrate the Security Server tests to the new testing framework.
Lastly we upgrade the Security Server framework.
Changes are included in version 7.4.0 (Q4 / 2023).
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MISP2 Ubuntu 22.04 support
We released MISP2 packages supporting Ubuntu 22.04 on the 6th of April for version 2.8.0. No new version was released, just upgraded packages for Ubuntu 22.04.
With the release we also released a migration guide for upgrading MISP2 in-place from Ubuntu 18 to Ubuntu 22. The migration guide can be found here: MISP2 Ubuntu 18.04 to 22.04 upgrade
Due to quite a large gap between the two Ubuntu versions, there were some notable changes in the environment:
PostgreSQL was updated from version 10 to version 14.
There were no incompatibilities between the versions as far as MISP2 was concerned so the upgrade itself is fairly straightforward. However, due to the way MISP2 dependencies are configured for debian packages, the PostgreSQL software is not automatically updated during the migration so first the cluster needs to be updated from 10 to 12 when upgrading from Ubuntu 18 to 20 and then again from 12 to 14 when doing the final upgrade to Ubuntu 22.
Tomcat was updated from version 8 to version 9.
This is a bit more tricky since MISP2 stores its configuration in the webapp directory for Tomcat. That in turn means that to upgrade the packages without needing to reconfigure the web application, the Tomcat 9 path needs to be pre-created and configuration files copied there before starting the upgrade.
Regarding the Tomcat server configuration itself, there were also a few changes to the default AJP connector configuration. This means that during installation, the package introduces some additional attributes in the connector configuration compared to what was done on Tomcat 8.
Finally, there is currently a bug in Ubuntu 22, which causes the default Tomcat 9 installation to not work correctly with JAVA 8. This means that an additional step is required after installation to work around the issue. More information about the bug is available here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/tomcat9/+bug/1972829
Apache2 configurations are updated as part of the regular MISP2 upgrade process, so also any custom configurations should be backed up and restored manually.
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Open topics
Save the date: the X-Road Community Meeting 2023 will be organised online on the 22nd of September 2023.
The call for proposals will be opened by the end of April. Anyone is welcome to submit proposals!
The X-Road source code repository’s develop-7.xbranch containing the code for the new Central Server will be merged into the develop branch within 3-4 weeks.
After the merge, the develop branch will contain the new Central Server UI and management REST API.
The Central Server documentation hasn’t been updated to match with the new implementation yet. The aim is to update the documentation before the actual release in June.
New online training on Sustainability in Software Development has been published in the X-Road Academy: