There’s a new release of Publ. There’s no new features, but there’s a huge performance improvement.
I’d been having some performance issues where on my larger sites, the main Atom feed was taking a long time to render. It didn’t really bother me too much because thanks to aggressive caching it would only cause an occasional slow page load (on the order of a few seconds) every now and then, but I thought there was probably something wrong with the I/O characteristics of how pages render.
Given an existing entry, category, or template object you can retrieve an image relative to their context, using entry.image, category.image and template.image, respectively
Images can now take a value of link=True in order to force a link to the full-size rendition without setting a lightbox gallery ID
Links will no longer include the template name if it’s the same as the category default (so you no longer need to do annoying things like view.link(template=template if template.name != 'index')
Similarly, path-alias to the index template will now work correctly if the category’s default template is notindex
What’s this, another Publ release? Why, yes! While revamping my personal website I came across some additional things that needed some Publ fixes to really work well.
The changes since 0.7.24 are:
Consider whitespace-only entry parts (entry.body and entry.more) to be False
Enable cache-control on templates which aren’t user-dependent (such as stylesheets), hopefully cutting down on FOUC issues
Enable an appropriate same-site cookie policy for 2023
A fix to the search indexer allowing it to drop invalid entries
There was also a minor fix released as 0.7.23 which was to unpin the version of watchdog, which allows Publ to run in debug/hot-reload mode once again.
Actually it looks like I’ve been remiss in announcing the last several releases, because each of them just had minor changes! So here’s a bit of a catchup:
v0.7.19: Pass through rendition arguments (including quality and format) to the fullsize rendition
v0.7.20: Just a bunch of upstream dependency updates
Fixed an issue with some transparent images not being detected as transparent due to using uncommon formats (particularly grayscale-with-alpha PNGs in the LA pixel format)
At present there appears to be an occasional issue with how watchdog works (or doesn’t), and I haven’t figured out the rhyme or reason. A pending Publ release will hopefully fix this. My apologies for the inconvenience.
Pushl has been updated to be compatible with an API change made in Python 3.11, specifically fixing some functionality which was deprecated in Python 3.8 and which I somehow failed to notice the deprecation warning of.
0.7.17 had a critical bug in view.deleted where it wasn’t properly filtering query parameters, so that version has been yanked and 0.7.18 has been released in order to fix said bug.
Today marks the release of Publ v0.7.17. Aside from the usual upstream-dependency changes and progressive delinting, this release fixes a subtle but annoying issue with how View.link works. There’s a longer description of the issue on GitHub but the upshot of this is that now the parameters passed into a View object get properly validated, meaning that if you’re doing something like:
<ahref="{{view.previous(template='bob')}}>">
this will fail, as the correct syntax is (and always has been)
Minor release for Publ, wherein I fixed a single bug; namely, loading a category without the trailing / was causing an erroneous redirect, due to an apparent change in the depths of Flask.
This is one of those things where I really need to refactor Publ to make it properly unit-testable, gosh darnit.
I haven’t been working on this stuff in a while, but there were reasons to make some updates and releases for both Publ and Authl.
Publ changes:
Updated dependencies and fixed code standards to the latest pylint and mypy
Fixed a bug where if an image file disappears before the async rendition is generated, it was generating a 503 error instead of a 404
Authl changes:
Updated packages and fixed code standards to the latest pylint and mypy
Removed a couple of Fediverse method hacks which are no longer necessary due to updates in mastodon.py
Some of the dependency changes necessitated updating the minimum Python version; in particular, Publ and Authl now require Python 3.7.2 or greater. But if you’re still running Python 3.6 for some reason you’re used to things being broken or outdated.
Also, due to an impending change in Flask, the Publ API is going to have to change somewhat; the short version is that app.secret_key will no longer be the means of configuring authentication. Most likely the config will change to get a secret_key key within the auth section instead. This actually makes the configuration a lot easier to deal with anyway, and I was never happy about this inconsistency. (In fact, I’m pretty sure that’s how it used to be configured until I changed it to be more Flask-like in the first place!)
It’s also possible that publ.Publ will revert to being a function that constructs a Flask application object, rather than being a subclass of Flask, but I haven’t yet investigated what the implications of this change would be. I believe there are a few places in the Publ codebase which rely directly on the subclass relationship (which would be difficult to change, such as the way that the Authl instance is associated with the application), and prior to that there’s a reason I switched it from a factory to a subclass in the first place, although I can’t quite remember what it was (it was probably either something to do with the ORM’s startup behavior or something to do with Authl’s lifetime). Either way, it’ll take significant investigation, and this will be necessary before Flask 2.3 is released. (In retrospect I meant to pin Publ’s Flask requirement to <2.3.0 before I did this release, but I forgot. Oops.)
Make the installations of whoosh and authl optional, to cut down on installation bloat for sites that don’t need them
The dependency changes have the potential for breaking functionality in existing sites. In order to restore full-text search and federated authentication, you’ll need to add whoosh and authl to your deployment options, respectively. If you’re using Poetry or another dependency manager which understands extras, you can specify the search and auth extras in your pyproject.toml; for example:
Hopefully this is a helpful change for some people, and not too annoying for others.
Update: Until I tried to roll out a site without Authl enabled, I had failed to realize one spot where Authl was still being unconditionally imported. If you actually want to run without Authl, update to v0.7.11.
Publ v0.7.9 is out. The only change from 0.7.8 is a bugfix to fenced code blocks, which were broken by an excruciatingly subtle change to the pygments API. Oops.
Also added an optional scope parameter to the TicketAuth request (which Publ itself doesn’t use and it doesn’t make much sense in a TicketAuth context but maybe someone will have a use for it)
Added the ability to specify absolute links on the login and logout template functions
Both a minor update, and a major one; due to upstream vulnerabilities in Pillow, which are only resolved in a version which drops support Python 3.6, Publ now also drops support for Python 3.6.