Synapse 1.55 released

Hi all, Synapse 1.55 is out! Let's see the main talking points of this new release.

Update: After the initial release of Synapse 1.55, the developers of a third-party tool (Jinja, which is the tool Synapse uses to render email and web templates) released a new version of their project which proved incompatible with Synapse. To address this issue, we have released Synapse 1.55.2.

Deployments of Synapse using the matrixdotorg/synapse Docker image or Debian packages from packages.matrix.org are not affected as they are already using a compatible version of the tool.

It's worth noting that the work we are doing to integrate Poetry into Synapse (more on that a bit further in this post) will, once completed, prevent this kind of issues from happening.

Removing support for Mjolnir 1.3.1 and older

Administrators of large homeservers and communities will already be familiar with Mjolnir, which is a tool designed to help them moderate a large number of rooms in an efficient way. It includes a bot as well as a Synapse module to better interface with the homeserver.

Due to a change in how we manage some of Synapse's internal utilities, this release of Synapse breaks compatibility with Mjolnir versions 1.3.1 and older. Homeserver administrators using Mjolnir and upgrading to Synapse 1.55 should make sure they're running Mjolnir version 1.3.2 or later.

See the upgrade notes for more information.

Moving synctl

synctl is a tool provided as part of Synapse to run and manage your instance and its workers (if any).

As part of our work to integrate Poetry in Synapse (which in turn will enable a lot of cool things, such as reproducible builds), we have recently moved the way we package this tool. As of this release, homeserver administrators should stop invoking it using its direct path (e.g. /path/to/synctl start), but should instead call it directly, e.g. synctl start.

This means homeserver administrators using synctl must make sure that the tool is in their PATH. This is automatically done when installing and upgrading Synapse using the matrixdotorg/synapse Docker image or Debian packages from packages.matrix.org. When installing from a wheel, sdist, or PyPI, an executable is created in your Python installation's bin directory.

See the upgrade notes for more information.

Everything else

This release also introduces new module callbacks, allowing homeserver administrators to more efficiently review which users are able to deactivate users and shutdown rooms. More information on that in Synapse's documentation.

We have also started experimenting with using the native Python asyncio event loop in Synapse which, if successful, would make it easier to use building blocks from the Python ecosystem when adding new features to Synapse.

See the full changelog for a complete list of changes in this release. Also please have a look at the upgrade notes for this version.

Synapse is a Free and Open Source Software project, and we'd like to extend our thanks to everyone who contributed to this release, including (in no particular order) Dirk Klimpel, Beeper, and ~creme.