v0.0.51 RC Release

From now on rather than relying on the dry and not super-informative changelogs, I’ll be writing release notes for every Magda release.

Today we’re releasing the release candidate for v0.0.51, which is a small release mainly focused around accessibility improvements.

Accessibility

Australia’s Digital Transformation Agency recently commissioned a full accessibility audit of Magda’s web interface — as of v0.0.51, all the critical and high problems found have been resolved. This includes:

• Various issues with the Suggest Dataset form
• Titles of landing page stories not being read out by screen readers
• The “Skip to Navigation” skiplink actually skipping to navigation
• Making the Data Quality Tooltip able to be read by screen readers
• Making the Data Quality stars read out “x out of 5 stars” instead of reading “image, image, image, image, image”

Operations

We’ve also done a lot of work to make Magda run better. We’ve now added readiness and liveness checks to all our services, and added the ability to check the status of all of them outside of Kubernetes by GETting /status/ready. We’ve added priority classes to all our pods, so that more important pods (like Elasticsearch, databases and the Gateway) can kick other less important pods (like minions) off nodes if necessary, resulting in a more resilient solution. We’ve also made a few improvements to the create-secrets script, including fixing a bug that stopped databases from starting unless the secret was manually edited.

Other New Features

• For greater security, Magda is now able to automatically upgrade users who connect to it via HTTP to HTTPS.
• The search now automatically detects region names in the search text and boosts results falling in that region.

Migration Notes

Most readiness/liveness checks have now moved from /v0/healthz to /status/live and /status/ready — make sure to update any external health checks when you upgrade, especially if you’re using a GCE ingress, which doesn’t automatically update its health check URL.

As always, the new version is available as a helm chart at https://charts.magda.io, and you can try the new features out at https://search.data.gov.au. Full changelog is here.