Release Notes - Yoda v2.0

Version: 2.0

Released: 6 October 2025

What’s new

Changes affecting functionality for data stewards and researchers

  • Multi-file download: added support for downloading multiple files and folders directly from the portal as a zip file
  • Open data package download: added support for downloading an open data package from the landing page as a zip file
  • File browser navigation: when searching for data objects, the browser now navigates directly to the results page where the data object is located (this does not apply to collections with a large number of data objects).
  • Keyword selector: introduced a new tree keyword selector for use in metadata forms, supporting controlled vocabularies. It is currently used in the EPOS-MSL metadata schema
  • SURF Portal theme: added a new theme for the SURF portal
  • Multiple deposit groups: enhanced support for managing multiple deposit groups in the deposit module (previously, the deposit module supported only a single group per environment)
  • Landing page themes: added support for technical administrators to configure a customizable theme for landing pages using the landingpage_theme and landingpage_root Ansible parameters. It works by configuring Yoda to generate landing pages that use a custom CSS file.
  • Data package archiving: the data package archiving process will now automatically retry failed copy to vault operations, which improves the reliability of this process.
  • Vault archiving workflow: enhanced support for the vault archiving workflow
  • Secured status removal: removed the Secured status from the research space
  • Intake module removal: removed the intake module
  • Group manager: Group managers and technical admins can now change their own role to a normal member or remove themselves from a group as long as there is another group manager in the group.

Changes affecting technical administrators

  • Ubuntu and AlmaLinux support: added support for Ubuntu 24.04 and AlmaLinux 9
  • New admin privilege group: introduced a new admin privilege group (priv-admin), which allows users to perform administrative tasks
  • Functional administration page: added a new administration page for performing functional tasks via the portal, such as setting a maintenance banner in the portal
  • Ansible library for iRODS: added an Ansible library to modify iRODS resources
  • NFS Shares Configuration: introduced an Ansible role for configuring NFS shares as iRODS storage resources
  • Rsyslog Support: added support for rsyslog to log iRODS messages in a readable format
  • RADIUS fallback removal: removed the RADIUS fallback option
  • Experimental caching: introduced experimental support for portal view and API caching

Other changes

  • Python: update rulesets to 3.12
  • iRODS: update to v4.3.4
  • Python-irodsclient: update to v3.2.0
  • GoCommands: update to v0.11.5
  • Flask and dependencies: update to v3.1.1
  • Bootstrap: update to v5.3.8
  • Mailpit: update to v1.27.9

Known issues

Upgrading from previous release

Software version requirements

The playbook requires Ansible 2.16.x or higher.

Version constraints:

  • Requires Yoda external user service to be on version 1.9.x or higher.
  • Requires Yoda public server to be on version 1.9.x or higher.
  • Although Yoda itself supports EL 8 systems (e.g. RHEL 8) as a database server, Ansible has dropped support for EL 8 in version 2.17.0. It is recommended to use EL 9 or Ubuntu 24.04 LTS for new database servers. For existing EL 8 database servers, run Ansible 2.16.x in a virtual environment, and install Python 3.12 on the EL 8 server:
sudo yum install python3.12 python3.12-pip
sudo /usr/bin/python3.12 -m pip install cryptography psycopg2-binary selinux

Upgrade process

  1. Backup/copy custom configurations made to Yoda version 1.9.5 / 1.10.0 To view what files were changed from the defaults, run git diff.

  2. After ensuring the configurations are stored safely in another folder, reset the Yoda folder using git stash or when you want to delete all changes made: git reset --hard.

  3. Check out the v2.0.4 tag of the Yoda Git repository: 
    git checkout v2.0.4
  4. Set the Yoda version to v2.0.4 in the configuration: 
    yoda_version: v2.0.4
  5. If the old configuration contained an iRODS authentication scheme setting, update it to use pam_password. Example: 
    irods_authentication_scheme: pam_password
  6. It is recommended to explicitly set the Ansible interpreter path in the group_vars (if the Yoda environment servers all have the same Linux distribution) or in the host_vars (if they have different Linux distributions) in order to prevent problems with Ansible using a different interpreter than expected.

For EL 9 environments:

  ansible_python_interpreter: /usr/bin/python3.9

For EL 8 and Ubuntu 24.04 LTS environments (see also additional instructions above for EL 8 servers):

  ansible_python_interpreter: /usr/bin/python3.12
  1. Install all Ansible collections needed to deploy Yoda: 
    ansible-galaxy collection install -r requirements.yml
  2. Run the Ansible playbook in check mode: 
    ansible-playbook -i <path-to-your-environment> playbook.yml --check
### EXAMPLE ###
ansible-playbook -i /environments/development/allinone playbook.yml --check
  3. If the playbook has finished successfully in check mode, run the Ansible playbook normally: 
    ansible-playbook -i <path-to-your-environment> playbook.yml
### EXAMPLE ###
ansible-playbook -i /environments/development/allinone playbook.yml
  4. Update publication endpoints if there are published packages (DataCite, landingpages and OAI-PMH): 
    irule -r irods_rule_engine_plugin-irods_rule_language-instance -F /etc/irods/yoda-ruleset/tools/update-publications.r
  5. Manually restart Apache on all portal and WebDAV servers

On Ubuntu:

sudo systemctl restart apache2

On RHEL:

sudo systemctl restart httpd
  1. Manually restart the portal application on all portal servers 
    sudo touch /var/www/yoda/yoda.wsgi /var/www/yoda/yoda_debug.wsgi
  2. When updating from a version before v2.0.4 to v2.0.4 or later, the statistics export function performance improvements will become effective after completion of the first storage statistics job run after the upgrade. Either wait one or two days for the scheduled job to complete, or manually run a statistics update job after the upgrade: 
    /bin/irule -r irods_rule_engine_plugin-irods_rule_language-instance -F /etc/irods/yoda-ruleset/tools/storage-statistics.r