Kollaborate Server 2025.1.1 Beta 1 - new backend with significant performance, security and robustness improvements

We've just released a major new update for Kollaborate Server, our self-hosted workflow platform for pro video. This version is beta due to the number of major changes involved.

New version number format

The first thing you'll notice is that we're now numbering versions by the current year, the major version number for this year, and a minor version number.

New backend

We've replaced Apache with our own custom web server. This provides performance, security and robustness improvements. Our plan is to eventually rewrite all of the PHP code on the site with the new system. As of right now, file streaming, downloads, heatmaps, captchas, some parts of the upload cycle, and some file operations are using the new backend, with the rest being forwarded to the old backend.

So both backends currently coexist and we had to completely reimplement user login sessions to work with both systems at the same time, which now make use of Redis Stack Server. If you have a non-Docker installation you'll need to install Redis Stack Server - see the Installation Guide for details on how to do this.

Automatic upgrades

No more having to visit /upgrade and run the upgrader manually. Upgrades will now happen automatically when Kollaborate Server launches.

Security / traffic management

We've added several security and traffic management features to increase the availability of your site under load or malicious abuse. Kollaborate Server will now shed load at times of extremely high traffic, which can help mitigate DDOS attacks. It will also rate limit requests and return an error if a user makes too many requests too quickly.

You may have seen lots of 404 errors in your logs for URLs that don't exist like /wp-admin. They are users scanning for vulnerabilities (Kollaborate does not use these technologies and is not vulnerable to these issues). Those users are now automatically banned for 24 hours or until the server is relaunched.

Automatic database backups

Kollaborate Server will now periodically backup your database, including before a database upgrade.

Synced Sessions deprecated

The Synced Sessions feature has been deprecated and will be removed in a future update. We remain committed to solving this issue in the long-term, but plan to solve it in a different way.

Easier setting of maximum uploaded file size

It's now much easier to set the maximum uploadable file size - just edit max_upload_size_gb in server_config.toml.

Update notification

Kollaborate Server now checks for updates automatically and will show an icon to let you know that an update is available.

There are lots of additional changes - see the release notes for more details. We're excited to take this big step with our new backend and we welcome feedback about the changes.

Kollaborate is an essential cloud workflow platform that allows you to share files with clients and team members while integrating with Digital Rebellion apps and services. Kollaborate Server allows you to host the platform in-house on your own servers and storage. To find out more, see the Kollaborate Server overview or register for the free cloud trial (Server trials are available on request).