Release v3@alpha.7 🎉

We are pleased to announce you that Strapi v3@alpha.7 is available, with an important new plugin: Users & Permissions!

What’s new in alpha.7? 🚀

Alpha.6 has been a major step for Strapi. Thanks to your constructive feedback, we fixed a lot of issues and added some new features.

Framework

• Decrease installation time by 300% removing unnecessary dependencies (from 5-6 min to 1-2 min).
• Decrease project generation time by 400% (from 80s to 20s).
• Better management of cross-dependencies between the administration panel and plugins.
• Fix Windows issue related to the symlink created during the installation.
• Ensure the project can start without locales.
• Add bootstrap function for middlewares and review default configuration.
• Allow plugins models.

Admin panel

• Detach administration panel from the project to remove the old monolithic architecture.
• Improve the layout configuration system for Content Manager to redirect actions to specific controllers actions.
• Allow load order plugins definition.

Plugins

Users and Permissions plugin is now available in Strapi!

In v3@alpha.6, the admin panel and generated APIs were not secured at all. That was real limitation to deploy Strapi APIs in production. For this specific reason, hundreds of you have been waiting for this new plugin.

From now, Authentication and Permissions management are out-of-the-box features:

• Authentication with JWT: register and login API routes.
• Roles management: each user can be linked to one or many roles (administrator, guest, etc.).
• Per route ACL permissions: adjust routes permissions from the admin panel.
• Admin panel access: the dashboard access is restricted to admin users only.

Thanks to this new plugin, you are now able to secure the admin panel and each endpoint of your API, within a few clicks.

This way, you can for example restrict entry creation to administrators but allow data fetch for anonymous users.

Let's see how it works:

Give it a try!

Looking forward to try this new version?

Requirements:

• Node (version 8 or 9) installed on your machine.
• MongodDB installed and running.

Install it:

1$ npm i strapi@alpha -g

Check installation:

1$ strapi -v

It should print 3.0.0-alpha.7.

Create your first project:

1$ strapi new my-app

Start your server:

1$ cd my-app
2$ strapi start

Open the admin panel, start building your API, give a look at the documentation to discover the next steps.

Source: giphy.com

Migrating from v3@alpha.6 to v3@alpha.7

Here are the necessary steps to migrate:

• Install Strapi globally: npm i strapi@alpha -g.
• Create a new project: strapi new my-app.
• Copy the folders plugins and admin from this new project to your existing project.

Win a t-shirt!

Some of you won a t-shirt during v3@alpha.6 release.

This time, it could be yours, so try to win one of the three available t-shirts by retweeting our latest tweet.

Three winners will be drawn among people having retweeted our latest tweet before January 10th at 12:00am Paris time.

What's next?

The next release will include plugin installation from the admin panel. Also, because SQL usage with Strapi is currently not intuitive, we are going to offer a better CLI user experience (database type prompt and table structure verification). Last be not least, relations between the app and plugins models are currently not possible, which will be fixed.

API usage analytics is crucial for every company. For that specific reason, we plan to offer, at the end of January, a brand new plugin called Analytics. Thanks to it, you will be able to get unique and precise insights about what your users do with your API. Please contact us if you want to be part of the beta program.

Many of you gave us a list of wanted features. However, it becomes difficult to quantify these requests to prioritize the development of the next feature. To improve that, we are going to add a new page on the website. This page, inspired by the Webpack's Vote system, will allow all of you to up-vote, down-vote, and suggest features you would like in Strapi.

In the meantime, please comment on this article to let us know what features you would like next.

PS: don't forget to share our latest tweet to win a t-shirt!

The Strapi Team