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4.0.0 Release Notes

4.0.0 Release Notes

Name: "Kraken brown apple"
Release Date: March 22, 2022

Rundeck 4.0 Release Notes

Caution

Warning: This release contains a bug that will cause issues in environments using a Load Balancer in front of Rundeck and running on https. If your environment leverages a load balancer (NGINX, ELB, etc) and the server.useForwardHeaders=true is set there may be a situation where this version reverts to using http instead of https.

Rundeck 4.1.0 fixes this bug.

Rundeck Enterprise has a new Name

With the introduction of version 4.0 the Rundeck Enterprise version will be renamed to PagerDuty Runbook Automation Self-Hosted. The Rundeck Cloud version announced late in 2021 is Generally Available and will be known as PagerDuty Runbook Automation. Read more about Runbook Automation. The Open Source version will continue to be Rundeck. The renames will take some time to implement, so bear with us as we update pages, documentation, and other areas of our new ecosystem.

Enterprise Runner

With version 4.0 the Enterprise Runner will be Generally Available. The Enterprise Runner is built to meet the latest zero-trust security models. The Runner is deployed behind the firewall where it securely connects to nodes and executes automation tasks within the network zone. It calls back to the cluster endpoint via HTTPS to fetch the task list. This deployment model eliminates the need for SSH tunnels between zones.

Enhanced Security Features

A variety of new features will help enhance the security of your Automation solution.

  • User Class Management is available to help manage your licensed users and what they are allowed to do.
  • Enhanced Webhook Security with Authorization strings that can be regenerated and provide another layer of security.
  • Password Complexity can be enabled for User Manager to encourage local users to use more secure passwords. Complexity can be set by length and guess-ability.
  • Password Reset by Email is now available for local users from User Manager systems with email notifications configured. Instead of setting a user’s password this will send them a 1 time link to set their own password.
  • Failed Login Rate Limiting will help prevent brute force attempts by locking accounts after a configurable number of failed logins.

Plugin Enhancements

“Under the hood” updates

Along with all the new features above, our major version releases always include significant updates to the foundational libraries we use to build Rundeck. The following highlights some of those new versions. The result is a more stable, extensible and secure product from the extensive library updates included.

  • Grails 5 and Gradle 7.2 are the fundamental frameworks used to build Rundeck.
  • UI is now built with Node 16
  • Docker images now use Ubuntu 20.04 as the base OS.

Feature Deprecation

Configuration through config.groovy will be deprecated in future versions. The primary use for this was advanced mail configuration, which is now supported by Configuration Management or rundeck-config.properties.

Version Cadence

Starting with 4.0 the product will be following a more traditional Major/Minor/Patch semantic versioning system. Previously, iterative releases were increasing on the 3rd (Patch) number. Going forward those same releases will be iterating on the 2nd (minor) number. This change will allow us greater flexibility to issue minor/quick patches when the need arises and align better with industry standards.

API Changes

The new Current API version number is: 41.

Check the API Versions page for all the details.

Deprecations:

The API Deprecation version is now: 14. This means that future Rundeck releases will have a minimum API version of 14.

XML API support is now deprecated and will be removed in a future version(s). This applies to the majority of API endpoints which support XML requests/responses, however the “Job XML” format used for Job serialization is not being deprecated. API usage should be updated to use JSON.

Promotions:

Some API endpoints previously marked as incubating have now been promoted to Generally Available (GA), including Enterprise Calendar features, and Cluster Member Execution Mode toggle endpoints. Please check the API docs to see what has changed. In general, the /incubating URL path is now removed, and the current API version of 41 is now the required minimum for those endpoints.

Enterprise Updates

  • Fix tour manager export issues
  • When a job is killed send cancel signal to Runner
  • Enhanced Runner Installation and Management UI
  • Include AWS SSM plugin
  • Add Azure group source plugin to pull user membership for SSO
  • Add clusterMode ENV vars to Docker Remco mapping
  • Fix GUI issue - Node wizard - Authentication
  • Add password complexity to User Manager
  • Result Data Feature Finalization
  • Obscure Password Input on S3 Resource Model
  • Update Rundeck Enterprise official Docker base image to Ubuntu 20.04
  • Allow for pulling in of all secret types by Thycotic
  • PagerDuty manage users plugins

Core Product Updates

Here is a link to the full list of public PRs

Community Contributors

  • Travis Yoder (trayo)
  • debanne (debanne)
  • sclarson (sclarson)

Staff Contributors

  • Greg Schueler (gschueler)
  • Stephen Joyner (sjrd218)
  • Imad Jafir (imad6639)
  • Luis Toledo (ltamaster)
  • Rodrigo Navarro (ronaveva)
  • Carlos Eduardo (carlosrfranco)
  • Miguel Ramos (mishingo)
  • Christopher McCarroll-Gilbert (chrismcg14)
  • Jason Qualman (qualman)
  • Alexander Abarca (alexander-variacode)
  • Alberto Hormazabal Cespedes (ahormazabal)
  • Leonel Juarez (L2JE)
  • Eric He (ehe-pd)
  • Amir Jafarvand (ajafarvand)
  • Devlin Cashman (devlincashman)
  • Jeremy Olexa (jolexa)
  • Osmar Perez (perezo-pd)
  • Forrest Evans (fdevans)
  • Jake Cohen (jsboak)