Seafile Server Professional Edition 7.1: Preparing the foundation for the next development stage

We are pleased to officially release Seafile Server Professional Edition 7.1. The Community Edition of Seafile 7.1 was released on 2020-03-26.

Seafile 7.1 brings to an end a major upgrade of its code-basis. The ambition was to create a rock-solid, high performance platform for Seafile’s development in the years to come. The first step of this undertaking was accomplished roughly 12 months ago with the release of Seafile 7.0. The user-part of Seafile’s frontend was recoded in React, a JavaScript library developed from dynamic websites. Seafile 7.1 completes the job begun. The system administration in Seahub is now also written in React. But the recoding of the frontend is only one part of the code-basis upgrade! Under the hood, Python 2, which reached end of life at the beginning of 2020, was completely replaced by Python 3 code. We think we delivered on our ambition.

Our developers haven’t busied themselves with recoding though. We have also added some new and interesting features to this release. We present the most important ones here; for a complete list, check the changelog.

Easy integration of Seafile and third party programs (CE + PE)

You can now generate API tokens for a library and integrate Seafile with third party programs. In the old version, you need to create an access token using a user email and password. The access token can do anything the user can do. The new API token restricts the access to a single library, which is more secure and more convenient to manage.

You can find the API documents for using the library token here https://download.seafile.com/published/web-api/v2.1/library-api-tokens.md

Guest invitation plus (PE)

The more intensive the collaboration with external partners gets, the less fitting exchanging data by sharing links becomes. As a guest, an external party has a user account and can use the web interface as well as the clients – within the limits of the restricted guest role. In Seafile 7.1, sharing with guests has become a lot smoother as a guest invitation and a library share can be made in one go. With the acceptance of the invitation, the guest is granted access to the shared library. In previous versions of Seafile, a library share could only be made after the acceptance of the invitation.

Improved document handling (CE + PE)

New features in Seafile 7.1 also make the handling of documents more straighforward, more comfortable, and more secure. Seahub’s PDF-preview now offers various zoom levels to be changed by the click of a zoom-in and a zoom-out button. Taking Markdown files into the analog world – on paper – is also much improved. When using the browser’s print function, the resulting document shows only the MD-file’s content with the proper formating. Finally, beginning with Seafile 7.1, the integration of Seafile and ONLYOFFICE supports JSON web tokens which prevent the substitution of important parameters in ONLYOFFICE Document Server.

Installation and upgrade

While Seafile 7.1’s installation procedure has not changed compared to earlier versions, the upgrade from Seafile 7.0 is a bit more complicated than usual due to the migration to Python 3. The upgrade notes guide you through the process.

The Professional Edition is available for download in our Customer Center, the installation packages for Debian/Ubuntu and CentOS can be downloaded from our download site. Docker images for both Seafile editions will also be available soon.