IRIDA 21.01 Released

February 02, 2021

IRIDA’s first release of 2021 is now available for download! Find the new release at https://github.com/phac-nml/irida/releases.

One of the most noticeable changes in this IRIDA version is an update to IRIDA’s main navigation bar at the top of the page.

IRIDA’s navigation panel has redesigned with up to date UI libraries and future functionality in mind. The redesigned navigation panel will function similar to previous versions, but will allow IRIDA to add more functionality for the future.

Announcements Upgrade

IRIDA’s announcements system is undergoing updates to make it more useful for IRIDA users and administrators. In this release the announcements panel on the dashboard page has been redesigned with more usability in mind, and the administration of announcements has been rebuilt. High priority announcements have also been added to the system to inform users of important upgrades or changes to your IRIDA system. Watch for future updates to the IRIDA announcements system to allow administrators to better communicate important changes to their users.

IRIDA Usage Statistics

IRIDA’s administrator panel has added a user statistics panel to help give administrators an overview of the recent system usage. This page includes charts showing recent activity in the system, and administrators can click into the charts to drill down for more detailed information.

Data Synchronization improvements

IRIDA’s project synchronization system has added a couple of improvements for the 21.01 version.

First, FAST5 data can now be synchronized between remote projects. This adds to IRIDA’s previous ability to synchronize sequencing data, assemblies, and metadata. Second, this version updates how an IRIDA client checks for changes in a remote project. This update will send a hash of the entire project’s contents to the client when it’s checking for changes. The client will check whether this hash matches its local copy, and if so will skip the synchronization stage. In cases where there are no changes to a remote project, this change should significantly improve synchronization performance and reduce load on both IRIDA server and client systems.

Metadata Improvements

This upgrade contains a significant change to the way IRIDA stores metadata behind the scenes. This change was made to improve performance for future IRIDA metadata development, but also due to some oddities the development team noticed with how IRIDA’s auditing system worked with metadata changes. With this change we’re recommending additional backup procedures for this update. For a full description of these changes and update procedures, see our documentation at https://phac-nml.github.io/irida-documentation/administrator/upgrades/#sample-metadata-audit-record-updates.

Because of these changes to the metadata system, all previous analysis pipeline plugins must be updated to conform to IRIDA’s new service-based metadata structure. Many analysis pipelines have already been updated, so you should check IRIDA’s analysis pipeline listing for new versions at https://github.com/phac-nml/irida-pipeline-plugins.

Other updates

IRIDA’s documentation site has been migrated to GitHub Pages. Find the new documentation at https://phac-nml.github.io/irida-documentation/.
IRIDA’s CI testing has been moved to GitHub Actions. This will help IRIDA integrate its development process into the GitHub ecosystem, and in the future will help us automate more of our build and release process. See IRIDA’s builds at https://github.com/phac-nml/irida/actions.