Modernising and securing Joplin, one package at a time

Fri, 09 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT

If you watch the Joplin source code repository, you may have noticed a lot of Renovate pull requests lately. This Renovate tool is a way to manage dependencies - it automatically finds what needs to be updated, then upgrade it to the latest version, and create a pull request. If all tests pass, we can then merge this pull request. So far we have merged 267 of these pull requests.

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Modernising and securing Joplin, one package at a time

Thu, 29 Jul 2021 10:32:34 GMT

Updating Joplin packages was long due. It is necessary so that we don't fall behind and end up using unsupported or deprecated packages. We also benefit from bug fixes and performance improvements. It is also important in terms of security, since recent package versions usually include various security fixes.

We used to rely on a tool called "npm audit" to do this, however it no longer works on the Joplin codebase, and it was always risky to use it since it would update multiple packages in one command - so if something went wrong it was difficult to find the culprit.

Renovate on the other hand upgrades packages one at a time, and run our test units to ensure everything is still working as expected. It also upgrades multiple instances of the same package across the monorepo, which is convenient to keep our code consistent. It also has a number of options to make our life easier, such as the ability to automatically merge a pull request for patch releases since this is usually safe (when a package is, for example upgraded from 1.0.1 to 1.0.3).

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- Maybe better handling of large documents? CodeMirror 6 has a demo that loads a document with millions of lines, so maybe that will solve the performance issues that some users were having

If everything works well, later on we should be able to add things like a toolbar, spellchecking and other features that are impossible with the current editor.

If you find any bug, feel free to report here. Also make sure you backup your notes regularly in case there's an issue!

The Jopin Cloud beta is now closed

Sun, 18 Jul 2021 10:35:38 GMT

The beta program helped narrow down a few issues and should make Joplin Cloud (and Joplin Server) more reliable. More precisely:

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About 7 bugs have been fixed, including two major ones regarding sharing, and one security issue.
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About a dozen improvements, new features and optimisations have been added following your feedback.
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As promised if you have a beta account you can keep using it and it will remain free for the three months after the account was created. After that, you will receive a link to start the Stripe subscription if you wish to keep using the account.

If you have sent me an email before the end of the beta and I didn't reply yet, I will do so soon, and will send you the confirmation email.

Thanks everyone for participating!