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1st October 2023

Introducing Wildcard Certificates, Template Functions & Northflank Registry

We’re happy to introduce a series of updates to certificate generation, templates, addons, and more!

Certificate Generation

Northflank now supports wildcard certificate generation via DCV (Domain Control Validation) or user imported certificates, which allows you to avoid the rate limits set by Let’s Encrypt. This is especially useful for users with a large number of subdomains. You can set up wildcard certificates by either setting a DNS entry to delegate ACME challenges to Northflank, or by importing your own custom certificate.

We also support the addition of domains with wildcard redirects to Northflank. Subdomains with wildcard redirects will be automatically verified when added. This should help you save time when adding multiple subdomains under the same domain. If your domain is also set up with a wildcard certificate, you can dynamically provision subdomains by including them inside templates.

Templates

Templates now support more advanced handling for string interpolation, including a wide variety of functions. We’ve added functions for string manipulation, arithmetic, and boolean logic to give you more flexibility. These functions can take arguments, references, and literals as parameters, and can also be nested. This lets you handle all sorts of use cases: convert references to base64 for use in secret files, perform conditional logic based on your template arguments, or extract data from a URL.

For more information, please visit our documentation.

Additional Template Updates:

  • Secret files can now contain references in line with other fields.
  • Git triggers no longer run templates on opening a pull request if the commit does not pass the file path rules.
  • Empty ref fields no longer disappear when switching between editor modes.
  • Trying to access a reference or argument that doesn’t exist will cause the template to throw an error rather than being replaced with an empty string. References and arguments used as function parameters will continue to be replaced with the empty string.
  • You can now use multiple interpolated strings within the same field.

Bug Fixes:

  • Fixed an issue with addon creation in templates where customCredentials.dbName could not be patched.
  • Fixed an issue where JobRun nodes could not be saved in the case where a job without a valid build was added and the deployment settings had not been modified.
  • Fixed an issue where cron jobs would not be suspended correctly when configuring the setting via templates.

Addons

Addons received several updates to performance, UX, and imports including:

  • Upgraded performance of MongoDB addon restores for larger databases and resource plans.
  • The addon dashboard now prioritises important addon variables. More variables are accessible on the Connection Details tab.
  • When importing an addon via file upload, the suggested backup name will now default to the filename instead of a random identifier.
  • Importing a MongoDB addon now requires you to specify which database to import. You will receive a warning when trying to import the admin database or another system database.

Registry

We’ve made it easier for you to pull container images from Northflank’s container registry. Images are now accessible from the following URL:

registry.northflank.com/[projectId]/[serviceId]:[buildId]

Additionally, buildId can now be a commit SHA or latest, which will return the latest relevant build. Now that the image url is deterministic, it should be much easier to integrate Northflank’s registry into your workflow.

API & CLI

We’ve added new API endpoints for managing notification integrations, so you can dynamically add new alerts and webhooks. We’ve also added endpoints for accessing backup and restore logs. For details please visit our API docs.

Usability

Updates:

  • The metrics UI now allows you to quickly select a specific time period by clicking and dragging on one of the graphs.
  • Added an option to permanently hide the banner prompting you to link a version control account.
  • Resources can now be filtered by tag.
  • Hovering over a commit SHA on the build list now displays the commit message for that commit.

Bug Fixes:

  • Log filters now apply correctly to live tail logs and when navigating to the page from an external link.
  • Fixed an issue that occasionally caused the logging UI to crash.
  • Fixed an issue that sometimes caused the page to crash when trying to restrict a container registry integration to specific projects.
  • Fixed an issue where Slack notification integrations failed to be created if lots of events were selected.
  • Fixed an issue where Dockerfiles would not be fetched correctly for services using public repositories.
  • Fixed formatting issues with the instances list when autoscaling scaled down the number of replicas.
  • Fixed an issue where multiplayer status would be shown on top of the observability modal.
  • Fixed an issue where the list of domains failed to add new entries while a search term was entered.
  • Fixed an issue where pressing enter on the domain search field would open the Add Subdomain modal.
  • When updating buildpack configuration for services or jobs, you will no longer receive unnecessary error messages.
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