I’m excited to announce the release of Konarr v0.5.0, a significant milestone in the project’s development! This release brings major improvements across the entire stack - from backend API enhancements to a completely overhauled user interface.
For those new to Konarr, it’s an open-source supply chain monitoring tool designed for homelabs and small deployments. It helps you track dependencies in your containers and servers to identify potential security vulnerabilities. Read more about the initial launch here.
So what’s new with v0.5.0
This release represents months of work improving the core functionality, user experience, documentation, and API capabilities. Let me break down the key changes.
Documentation & Resources
Lets start with something developers love writing and reading - documentation! To support the growing feature set and help new users get started, I’ve created the Konarr Documentation.
Currently I used Copilot to help generate the initial documentation site structure and some of the content. Over time I will be expanding the documentation to cover more advanced topics and use cases.
🎨 Frontend Overhaul
The frontend has received the most significant attention in this release with a complete UI refresh and numerous usability improvements. People sometime overlook the importance of a good user interface in security tools, but I believe it’s crucial for adoption and effective use. Its a little bit of a meme at this point that free and open-source tools often have clunky or outdated UIs.
I wanted to bring Konarr up to modern UI but not compromise on usability or performance.
Enhanced User Interface
One of the biggest changes in this release is the complete overhaul of the user interface. I wanted to make the UI more modern, user-friendly, and consistent across all views. For the past year I have been looking into design systems and UI/UX best practices to bring a more polished experience to Konarr. The result is a cleaner, more intuitive interface that makes it easier to navigate the application and use its features.
Here is the new UI for projects:
The UI has been standardized and modernized with:
- Consistent Design System: All components now use a unified color scheme and styling approach, making the interface more cohesive and professional.
- Button Class Utilities: Implemented reusable button classes for consistent styling across the application (#17).
- Improved Navigation: Better organization of views and clearer navigation patterns throughout the application.
- Login & Registration Updates: Streamlined authentication flow with improved error handling and user feedback (#25, #32).
New Home Page and Dashboard
A small but important addition to the UI is the new home landing page. Previously, when users connected to the application for the first time, they were taken directly to the loging or registration page. This wasn’t ideal as it didn’t provide any context about the application or its features.
Now there is a new dedicated home page that provides an overview of the application and quick access to key features.
After logging in, users are taken to the new dashboard view which provides a summary of their projects and dependencies. This was important for me as I wanted to give users a quick overview of their dependency landscape right after logging in.
The dashboard includes:
- Quick Stats Cards: At-a-glance metrics showing key statistics about your projects and dependencies (#22).
- Dependency Summary Tiles: Visual representation of dependency counts and distribution across your projects.
- Enhanced Notifications: Improved notification system for better visibility of important events (#33).
User Profile Management
This was an important feature request I wanted to add to be able to go from v0 to v1 of the project.
There are now a new user profile capabilities give you more control over your account:
- Profile View: Comprehensive user profile page showing account details and session information (#20, #21).
- Password Management: Built-in password change functionality directly in the UI.
- Password Strength Meter: Visual feedback on password strength during password changes and registration
- Session Details: View active sessions and account metadata.
Project Page Improvements
Another massive usability improvement is the redesign of the project details page. Previously, the project page was cluttered and hard to navigate, especially for projects with many dependencies. I wanted to improve the layout and information hierarchy to make it easier to find important details about each project.
Now the project has a summary page, dependencies list, security findings, and a setup instructions tab.
The setup tab is especially useful as it provides step-by-step instructions on how to integrate Konarr with your servers.
Each of these tabs provides focused information about the project and will look familiar to the previous version but broken up into different pages.
Dependencies Tab:
Security Findings Tab:
Setup Instructions Tab:
Here are the key improvements:
- Better Project Organization: Improved layout and information hierarchy for project details (#14).
Uploading SBOMs via the UI
This was a simple feature to add support for but I wanted to add support for manually uploading SBOMs via the UI. The reason for this was to allow users to add SBOMs without needing to use the API or CLI. Plus this allows you to quickly add SBOMs when testing or evaluating the tool.
This feature can be found under the new setup tab on the project details page.
Here are the details:
- SBOM Upload Functionality: Direct upload of Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) files through the UI (#13).
Copilot Assisted Development
One of the big changes I have introduced into the development of the frontend is the use of GitHub Copilot to assist with UI improvements. This is because I wanted to focus on speeding up the development of the user interface while maintaining code quality and consistency. In this release, GitHub Copilot made its first contributions to the project, helping with UI color standardization and TypeScript typing improvements (#29, #31).
You can also see in the repository I have added a Copilot Instructions file to help guide Copilot in making better suggestions for the project.
General Usability Improvements
Here is also a collection of various usability improvements across different views:
Managing large numbers of dependencies or projects is now much easier:
- Pagination with URL Sync: Dependencies list now supports pagination with state synchronized to the URL, making it easy to share specific views (#18).
- Store & Search Updates: Refined search functionality with better filtering and query handling (#30).
- Improved Performance: Optimized API calls using the
topparameter for consistent data fetching (#35).
For administrators, the admin settings have been completely refactored:
- Refactored Admin UI: Cleaner, more intuitive admin interface with better organization (#27).
- User Management: Improved user administration capabilities.
- Settings Organization: Better structured settings pages for easier configuration.
🔧 Backend & API Improvements
The backend has also received love but at a small cost of some breaking changes to the API along with numerous new features and improvements.
New API Endpoints
Several new APIs have been added to expand Konarr’s capabilities:
- Health API: New health check endpoint for monitoring service status (#107).
- User API: Complete user management API for creating, updating, and managing user accounts (#120).
- Server API Updates: Enhanced server APIs with better error handling and response formats (#121).
Breaking Changes
There are minimal breaking changes in this release, but be aware:
- API Response Formats: Some API endpoints now return additional fields. If you’re using the API directly, review your integration code.
- Configuration Changes: The frontend path configuration has been improved. Review your
konarr.ymlif you’ve customized frontend paths.
General Improvements
The command-line interface now supports:
- User Account Reset: New CLI command for resetting existing user accounts - useful for password recovery scenarios (#117).
Snapshots (point-in-time captures of dependencies) have been improved:
- Snapshot Updates: Better handling and management of snapshots (#112).
- Dependency Counting: New method to count dependencies per snapshot for better analytics (#118).
Background task handling has been enhanced:
- Task Improvements: Better task scheduling and execution (#122).
- Improved Reliability: More robust error handling in background tasks.
Configuration management has been refined:
- Data Path Handling: Improved configuration loading for data paths and frontend paths (#113).
- Frontend Path Management: Better handling of frontend static file paths.
Upgrading to v0.5.0
All you will need to do to upgrade is pull the latest Docker image and restart your container.
Using Docker
# Pull the latest image
docker pull ghcr.io/42bytelabs/konarr:0.5.0
# Or use the latest tag
docker pull ghcr.io/42bytelabs/konarr:latest
# Restart your container
docker-compose down
docker-compose up -d
And there you go, you’re now running Konarr v0.5.0!
Community & Feedback
As always, I welcome feedback and contributions from the community. If you encounter any issues or have feature requests:
- Report bugs on GitHub
- Request features
- Contribute code
- Star the project if you find it useful
Conclusion
Konarr v0.5.0 represents a significant step forward in making supply chain security monitoring accessible for homelabs and small deployments. The improved UI makes it easier to understand your dependency landscape, while the enhanced API provides more flexibility for automation and integration.
A huge thank you to everyone who has provided feedback, reported issues, and contributed to the project. The momentum is building, and I’m excited to see where the community takes Konarr next!
Try out v0.5.0 today and let me know what you think. Happy monitoring! 🎉