After launching v0.7 last month with the new Appwrite Cloud Functions and the Appwrite CLI, we are happy to share that Appwrite version 0.8 is nearing completion. We have prepared a list a list with some of the coolest features you can expect from the soon-to-be-released version.

Appwrite 0.8 will take the project one step closer to our anticipated release of Appwrite first stable release, version 1.0.

Anonymous Login 🕵️

It is important to consider the user experience when someone first comes to your application. The registration process can often prove to be a hurdle for users to use an application, especially if parts of the application are bound to an authentication process and hidden behind a login screen. Moreover, in today's world, the issue of privacy and data protection is a delicate one, especially because of new data privacy regulations, like GDPR and CPRA.

The anonymous login is used, allowing users to create an account - without providing personal information such as an email address, username, or password and convert it to a real account at a later stage.

JWT 🤖

By adding support for JWT authentication, developers can perform actions on behalf of their users and create a lot of new use-cases.

With the new JWT support combined with Cloud Functions and the Appwrite Server API, the ability to customize your backend workflows and create new scenarios in reaction to the user or Appwrite events is endless.

ARM Support 🧑‍💻

In order to keep up with the demands of ARM, all of our core containers now officially support the ARM ecosystem. This allows you to run Appwrite on Raspberry PI, Apple M1, AWS Graviton, and more. We aim to make Appwrite as tech agnostic as possible, and this matches very well with our self-hosted first approach, allowing Appwrite to run in any environment possible. And for all you Raspberry PI fans, yes, you could run appwrite on PI4, we're still working to allow all the features to be enabled, but it should be good to go. 😃

New Env Vars for Functions 🌩

Thanks to the community feedback, we have added some helpful environment variables to our Cloud Functions. From v0.8, every Cloud Functions will have access to the current project ID, user ID (if the function was triggered by an authenticated user), and a valid JWT. This will allow you to extend the Appwrite API easily and perform actions on behalf of your users from the function context.

New Image Preview Capabilities 🌠

Appwrite has advanced image delivery capabilities, including advanced image cropping and image optimization (WEBP). With the new version, we will introduce new capabilities to the image preview endpoint, including adding image borders, radius, and opacity. This will allow you to use Appwrite as a complete OSS alternative to other commercialized image serving solutions and is an excellent fit for integrating into applications that require high performant clients, and image serving has been an issue.

More Control Over Auth Methods 🔐

Giving you more control over what authentication methods are available and to what extent - we added more settings to the dashboard, which lets you configure your projects according to your needs.

The Root Account 🤴

In previous versions, the access to the Appwrite Console had to be configured by allowing specific Emails or IPs manually. Therefore the registration was open by default, and to prevent abuse, we added an option to limit the console to one root account. This will allow only a single administrative user. When a user has already signed-up, the console account creation endpoint will be blocked. This option will be enabled by default. You could still invite new members to join your project, but you won't have to worry about securing your console login before moving to a public host.

What's next? 💡

As we mentioned before, the Appwrite team is working hard to provide the stack with more cool features and stability required for Appwrite to run well in any production environment. These days, we focus on multiple big features released in our next releases, like Realtime capabilities and a GraphQL entry point.

We are also working on refactoring our database to allow you to choose between multiple different adapters and add custom DB indices. These changes are part of our ongoing efforts to allow developers using Appwrite to leverage their existing knowledge and run with confidence with the tools they already love.

Our new capabilities around custom DB indices will allow Appwrite to run in much bigger scale environments and are expected to result in a major performance boost when appropriately tuned.