Synapse 1.68 released

Hey everyone, it's time for a new Synapse release! Synapse 1.68 just dropped, let's have a look at what's inside.

Dependency changes

As announced in the Synapse 1.67 release announcement, Synapse 1.68 raises the minimum supported version of SQLite to version v3.27.0. This means that, if your installation of Synapse is using SQLite to manage its database, and the SQLite version used is lower than 3.27, you will need to upgrade to a more recent version before updating to Synapse 1.68. This change does not impact deployments using the matrixdotorg/synapse Docker image.

Synapse 1.68 also introduces the requirement of a Rust compiler for source checkouts. The minimum required version of Rust is 1.58.1. Installations that use pip install matrix-synapse, Debian packages from packages.matrix.org or the matrixdotorg/synapse Docker image to manage and run Synapse, are not impacted by this change.

See the upgrade notes for more information.

Admin API improvements

Synapse 1.68 introduces a new admin API which allows server administrators to query events in a given room that have been sent within a specific time window. This API mirrors the specification's /messages endpoint, and allows, among other things, paginating through a room's history. See the documentation for more information.

This version of Synapse also introduces a new admin API to help administrator of homeservers using an external authentication provider. This endpoint allows looking up a specific identifier on the authentication provider and resolving it into the identifier of the local user it's associated with, if any. See the documentation for more information.

The user admin API has also been updated to allow administrator of homeservers requiring agreement to the server's terms and conditions to view and edit the timestamp at which each user has provided their agreement.

Everything else

Synapse 1.68 greatly improves the validation of user input on most of the account management API endpoints.

This version of Synapse also adds a new request_id_header option to the configuration of HTTP listeners, which allows tracking the identifier Synapse generates for each request in that request's response. This can be helpful for correlating Synapse logs with reverse proxy logs. See the documentation for more information.

See the full changelog for a complete list of changes in this release. Also please have a look at the upgrade notes for this version.

Synapse is a Free and Open Source Software project, and we'd like to extend our thanks to everyone who contributed to this release, including (in no particular order) Denis Kariakin, Dirk Klimpel and Beeper, as well as anyone helping us make Synapse better by sharing their feedback and reporting issues.