Synapse 1.6.0 has landed and is here to brighten your day!

1.6.0's most notable feature is that of label based filtering. It allows for messages to be tagged with a given label so that clients can filter on the label, this means that clients can subscribe to specific topics in a room, such as #lunch.

Completely separately, from here on in new rooms will be version 5 by default, all this means in practice is that servers will respect server signing key validity periods. This won't make a lot of difference in day to day operation, but it is an important security consideration and we now have sufficient penetration across the federation to make version 5 the default.

Aside from that there are a bunch of bug fixes and improvements, including fixing a bug that in some cases prevented messages being decrypted shortly after a restart (#6363) and generally improving the room upgrade experience (#6232, #6235).

As ever, you can get the new update here or any of the sources mentioned at https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse. Also, check out our Synapse installation guide page

The changelog since 1.5.1 follows:

Synapse 1.6.0 (2019-11-26)

Bugfixes

• Fix phone home stats reporting. (#6418)

Synapse 1.6.0rc2 (2019-11-25)

Bugfixes

• Fix a bug which could cause the background database update handler for event labels to get stuck in a loop raising exceptions. (#6407)

Synapse 1.6.0rc1 (2019-11-20)

Features

• Add federation support for cross-signing. (#5727)
• Increase default room version from 4 to 5, thereby enforcing server key validity period checks. (#6220)
• Add support for outbound http proxying via http_proxy/HTTPS_PROXY env vars. (#6238)
• Implement label-based filtering on /sync and /messages (MSC2326). (#6301, #6310, #6340)

Bugfixes

• Fix LruCache callback deduplication for Python 3.8. Contributed by @V02460. (#6213)
• Remove a room from a server's public rooms list on room upgrade. (#6232, #6235)
• Delete keys from key backup when deleting backup versions. (#6253)
• Make notification of cross-signing signatures work with workers. (#6254)
• Fix exception when remote servers attempt to join a room that they're not allowed to join. (#6278)
• Prevent errors from appearing on Synapse startup if git is not installed. (#6284)
• Appservice requests will no longer contain a double slash prefix when the appservice url provided ends in a slash. (#6306)
• Fix /purge_room admin API. (#6307)
• Fix the hidden field in the devices table for SQLite versions prior to 3.23.0. (#6313)
• Fix bug which caused rejected events to be persisted with the wrong room state. (#6320)
• Fix bug where rc_login ratelimiting would prematurely kick in. (#6335)
• Prevent the server taking a long time to start up when guest registration is enabled. (#6338)
• Fix bug where upgrading a guest account to a full user would fail when account validity is enabled. (#6359)
• Fix to_device stream ID getting reset every time Synapse restarts, which had the potential to cause unable to decrypt errors. (#6363)
• Fix permission denied error when trying to generate a config file with the docker image. (#6389)

Improved Documentation

• Contributor documentation now mentions script to run linters. (#6164)
• Modify CAPTCHA_SETUP.md to update the terms private key and public key to secret key and site key respectively. Contributed by Yash Jipkate. (#6257)
• Update INSTALL.md Email section to talk about account_threepid_delegates. (#6272)
• Fix a small typo in account_threepid_delegates configuration option. (#6273)

Internal Changes

• Add a CI job to test the synapse_port_db script. (#6140, #6276)
• Convert EventContext to an attrs. (#6218)
• Move persist_events out from main data store. (#6240, #6300)
• Reduce verbosity of user/room stats. (#6250)
• Reduce impact of debug logging. (#6251)
• Expose some homeserver functionality to spam checkers. (#6259)
• Change cache descriptors to always return deferreds. (#6263, #6291)
• Fix incorrect comment regarding the functionality of an if statement. (#6269)
• Update CI to run isort over the scripts and scripts-dev directories. (#6270)
• Replace every instance of logger.warn method with logger.warning as the former is deprecated. (#6271, #6314)
• Port replication http server endpoints to async/await. (#6274)
• Port room rest handlers to async/await. (#6275)
• Remove redundant CLI parameters on CI's flake8 step. (#6277)
• Port federation_server.py to async/await. (#6279)
• Port receipt and read markers to async/wait. (#6280)
• Split out state storage into separate data store. (#6294, #6295)
• Refactor EventContext for clarity. (#6298)
• Update the version of black used to 19.10b0. (#6304)
• Add some documentation about worker replication. (#6305)
• Move admin endpoints into separate files. Contributed by Awesome Technologies Innovationslabor GmbH. (#6308)
• Document the use of lint.sh for code style enforcement & extend it to run on specified paths only. (#6312)
• Add optional python dependencies and dependant binary libraries to snapcraft packaging. (#6317)
• Remove the dependency on psutil and replace functionality with the stdlib resource module. (#6318, #6336)
• Improve documentation for EventContext fields. (#6319)
• Add some checks that we aren't using state from rejected events. (#6330)
• Add continuous integration for python 3.8. (#6341)
• Correct spacing/case of various instances of the word "homeserver". (#6357)
• Temporarily blacklist the failing unit test PurgeRoomTestCase.test_purge_room. (#6361)