January 2021 Galaxy Release (v 21.01)

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Highlights

New History Panel (Beta)

This release includes a preview of the new History Panel. The new history menu can be enabled and disabled in the options menu of the History Panel. For more details check out the 21.01 user release notes.

Performance Improvements

This release includes many performance improvements for browsing and searching Data libraries (Many thanks to Oleg Zharkov, Pull Request 10204, Pull Request 11099, Pull Request 10557, Pull Request 10558, Pull Request 10807), and improved job creation performance for certain classes of tools and copying Histories, Datasets and Dataset Collections (Pull Request 10539, Pull Request 10549). The performance of reading tool wrappers when starting Galaxy has been much improved. We have therefore decided to disable the tool document cache by default, since it only provides negligible speedups (Pull Request 10804, Pull Request 11447). The tool document cache can be re-enabled with the enable_tool_document_cache setting.

Offload Zip Archive Creation to NGINX

Galaxy can now utilize the NGINX module mod_zip to assemble and compress dataset collection and library dataset archives on the fly. This method is more efficient and can create large archives without affecting the Galaxy server process. The required setup is described in the admin documentation for proxying Galaxy with NGINX.

Workflow Enhancements and Fixes

This release contains many new features, enhancements and bug fixes for creating, running and reporting workflows described in greater detail in the 21.01 user release notes

History Import and Export

Histories can now be imported from and exported to the pluggable file source architecture introduced in the 20.09 release of Galaxy. This includes the users’ FTP folder, S3, Dropbox, ownCloud etc. In addition the History Export and Import dialogues have been rewritten to provide access to these new options and to provide more feedback during Import and Export process.

Also check out the 21.01 user release notes

Deprecation Notices

Deprecation of support for Python 3.5

Galaxy requires Python 3.6 or newer. Instructions for updating Python can be found in the Supported Python versions section of the documentation. Note that if you update to Python 3.7.2 or newer you need to set py-call-osafterfork to false in the uwsgi section of galaxy.yml.

Removal of IUC conda channel from default configuration

The IUC conda channel has been removed from the default configuration. This channel was used for installing dependencies that were old and not available in bioconda or conda-forge. These dependencies are now available in bioconda. By removing this channel Conda can work more efficiently and ignore outdated dependencies. If you have specified alternative channels in your Galaxy configuration we recommend removing the iuc channel from the conda_ensure_channels variable.

Removal of the communication server

This feature has not seen greater adoption and has been removed. Most communication has moved to Gitter or other chat services.

Get Galaxy

The code lives at GitHub and you should have Git to obtain it.

To get a new Galaxy repository run:
$ git clone -b release_21.01 https://github.com/galaxyproject/galaxy.git
To update an existing Galaxy repository run:
$ git fetch origin && git checkout release_21.01 && git pull --ff-only origin release_21.01

See the community hub for additional details regarding the source code locations.

Release Testing Team

A special thanks to the release testing team for testing many of the new features and reporting many bugs:

Release Notes

Enhancements

Fixes

To stay up to date with Galaxy’s progress, watch our screencasts; visit our community Hub; and follow us on Bluesky, Mastodon, and LinkedIn.

You can always chat with us on Matrix.

Thanks for using Galaxy!

The Galaxy Team