The year is slowly nearing its end and as part of the holiday season preparations we are wrapping up the Friendica 2020.12 release. As part of this, we are very happy to announce the availability of the Release Candid branch of Friendica 2020.12 and hope that some of you will join the process of hunting down rough edges and problems with the release, before the new stable version is published later this month.

If you want to help, now is the perfect moment to switch from the stable or development branch to the freshly created 2020.12-rc branch. To do so please run

git fetch
git checkout 2020.12-rc
git pull
bin/composer.phar install --no-dev

in the root directory of your Friendica and the addon directory. The command to update the dependencies (composer) is only necessary in the Friendica root directory.

Thanks for testing the new release! If you find any problems, please report them either at the issue tracker on github or in the support forum.

Please be aware the since the last stable release the database structure was changed, after the switch to the RC branch your server will need some time (hours) to perform these changes.

Known Problems

Please note, that one of the dependencies of Friendica is currently incompatible with PHP 7.0. If you are still running that version of PHP, please have a look at this forum thread for a workaround.

Should the DB update process get stuck

If you encounter this, please initiate the DB update manually from the command line by running the script

./bin/console dbstructure update

from the base of your Friendica installation. If the output contains any error message, please let us know using the channels mentioned above.