Open OnDemand 4.2 Release

Announcements
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Open OnDemand version 4.2 is now available as 4.2.2. Thank you to all of the community members who contributed code, suggestions, bug reports, documentation, and other assistance across the project, including the 9 first-time contributors across several core Open OnDemand GitHub repositories.

We’d like to recognize the following folks for their contributions to the 4.2 release:

  • Andrej Čermák, CESNET
  • James Willis, SciNet- University of Toronto
  • Michael Robbert, Colorado School of Mines
  • Robin Karlsson, CSC – IT Center for Science
  • Evan Felix, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
  • Harshit Soora, University of Maryland
  • Kristen Finch and Carolina Ternero, University of Washington

Please see the Acknowledgements section of the release notes for more details on their contributions.

Release Overview

This release focuses on significant accessibility improvements aligned with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level AA standard, in advance of the April 2027 compliance deadline under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act. It also includes new OS support, dependency updates, and several behavior changes.

Changes that May Impact Your Site the Most:

  • Support for Ubuntu 22.04 has been removed. Support for Debian 13 and Ubuntu 26.04 has been added.
  • Links now open in the current tab by default . Previous versions opened some links in a new tab.
  • The Active Jobs extended details panel now opens above or beside the table rather than inline to support screen reader navigation.
  • Debian and Ubuntu repository signing has changed from SHA1 to SHA512. If you are not using OnDemand’s release packages, please update your repository configuration to use the new DEB-GPG-KEY-ondemand-SHA512 key. See the release notes for details.

Dependency Updates:

  • Passenger 6.1.2
  • NGINX 1.28.0
  • ondemand-dex 2.45.1

Several Highlights of 4.2:

  • Accessibility improvements. Version 4.2 includes accessibility enhancements across the dashboard and core applications, including additional keyboard navigation support, improved labeling for form items and icons, additional regions and landmarks, improved focus handling on auto-updating pages, contrast improvements for links and buttons, and an improved screen reader alerting experience.
  • Accessibility Conformance Report (ACR). An ACR has been created for version 4.2 documenting Open OnDemand’s conformance with the WCAG 2.1 AA standard. It is available at openondemand.org/accessibility.
  • Software Bill of Materials. Open OnDemand 4.2 includes a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) in an industry-standard format, outlining OS-level software dependencies. The SBOM is published in a dedicated OSC repository titled open-ondemand-sbom.
  • OOD_WORKFLOW_SYNC_KEY for Project Manager workflows. Launchers within a workflow now receive a unique alphanumeric key per run, which makes it easier to synchronize launchers and safely read and write data without overwriting between runs.
  • Edit links hidden when downloads are disabled. For centers with download_enabled: false, the Files App and Project Directory tables will no longer display edit links. This prevents users from exporting file contents through the editor.
  • Interactive App popovers persist under hover and focus. App preview popovers in the Interactive Apps list now remain open while hover or focus is within the trigger or popover, which allows users to click links inside the popover.
  • PBSPro cluster_info API support. The System Status page now supports PBSPro clusters.

For more detailed information, please see the 4.2 release notes or the commit comparison between version 4.1 and 4.2.

Finally, we recommend testing the upgrade in a development or test environment before deploying to production. Step-by-step upgrade instructions for version 4.2.2 are available in the release notes.

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