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First preview of 1.3.0!

I’m very happy to finally present you with a first preview of the upcoming major 1.3.0 release: 1.3.0rc1!

There’s a multitude of new features and improvements plus of course also a small handful of bug fixes going to be in this release, way too much to list all of it here, but let’s at least take a look at some of them:

  • Finally there’s a way to keep all of your files for one project together in one place thanks to the newly added folder support. Along with that OctoPrint now also exposes copy and move functionality on the API, which the File Manager Plugin by Salandora will utilize to offer a full fledged file manager to make working with your new folders even easier.
  • A new wizard dialog system replaces the old “first run” dialog, leads through first time setup and/or consecutive setup steps and is also extendable by plugin authors to query information from users about freshly installed or updated plugins they need in order to run1. See the screenshots below for an example
  • Plugins may now temporarily or completely replace the web interface. It would for example be possible to have OctoPrint show you a different UI when connecting from a mobile device vs. your desktop machine, or from a specific machine vs all other machines. And to take some of the boilerplate out of connecting to the API from custom UIs, I’ve extracted out an API client into a Client JS library too. I’ve also prepared a small proof-of-concept example of a plugin utilizing the new possibilities by checking the login status of a user and delivering a login-only UI to anonymous users instead of the stock UI2: the ForceLogin plugin. UiPlugins and the JS Client Lib together open up a lot of possibilities in creating full blown dashboard systems, alternative UIs and customizations and I’m excited to see what plugin authors will do with these new toys! There are screenshots of some examples below.
  • A lot of UI improvements like e.g. test buttons for various settings like the webcam URLs or paths to executable like ffmpeg, a refactored printer profile editor, and a lot more tiny adjustments all around the UI.
  • More verbosity during updates of OctoPrint and installed plugins for logged in admins.
  • Better (and earlier) error reporting for timelapse issues.
  • Aggressive caching for APIs and UIs for improved load times and less resource consumption.
  • Centrally managed server commands for restarting OctoPrint and rebooting and shutting down the system its running on. For those OctoPrint will now generate entries in the System menu automatically3 and they will also be used for restarting after updates or after installing plugins that necessitate that.

That is only the tip of the iceberg, best take a look at the Changelog for a more comprehensive overview.

Please note that this is most likely not the final version that will be turned into the stable 1.3.0 release. I definitely expect there to still be bugs! And the goal of pushing this out now is to find those bugs in order to iron them out. I need your help with that since at this point I simply am not seeing the wood for all the trees anymore.

Still, please only install this if you are comfortable with having to do a manual roll back if push comes to shove and something does indeed break for you. It should not, but it could.

If you are tracking the “Devel RC” release channel, you should soon get an update notification just like you are used to from stable releases.

If you are tracking the “Maintenance RC” release channel, you will not get an update notification for this release candidate. If you want to give it a test whirl, you’ll need to switch to the “Devel RC” release channel.

If you are not interested in helping to test devel release candidates, just ignore this post, 1.3.0 stable will hit your instance via the usual way once it’s ready :)

You can find the full changelog and release notes as usual on Github.

Depending on the feedback regarding this version I’ll look into fixing any observed regressions and bugs and pushing out a follow-up version within the next two or three weeks.

Footnotes

  1. Note that this will also trigger for the CuraEngine plugin after you update if you haven’t yet setup a slicing profile). Just skip the wizard once and it will not ask you again :) ↩

  2. Please note that this will only protect OctoPrint’s UI. It will not be able to protect your webcam since that’s not served by OctoPrint, OctoPrint is only embedding it (as a side-note though, I’m working on a solution for that too). So do not use that in a setting were a) the URL of the webcam stream might be guessable and b) someone anonymously accessing the webcam would be a serious privacy issue. ↩

  3. If you already had the system commands configured manually or had gotten them preconfigured through OctoPi, they’ll now show up twice - this can be rectified by simply removing the manually configured system commands, but you might want to wait with that until the stable release of 1.3.0 :) I might also still add some migration step for that. ↩

Images

The new folder support
The new wizard dialog system in action
A custom UI by Mr Beam tailored to their laser cutter, done through a UiPlugin
A custom UI by Leapfrog for their printers, done through a UiPlugin
A login-only view forced for logged out/anonymous users, done through a UiPlugin
Author
Gina Häußge
Published
19 Oct 2016
Category
Release