Release announcements

Zulip Server 12.1 bug fix release

Mateusz Mandera • 3 min read

We released Zulip Server 12.1 today! This is a bug fix release, containing cherry-picked changes since Zulip Server 12.0.

Upgrading

We recommend that all installations upgrade to this new release. See the upgrade instructions in the Zulip documentation. Zulip Cloud has already been upgraded with the improvements in this release.

Commercial support for server upgrades is available for installations that purchase a Business or Enterprise plan. For community support, everyone is welcome to drop by the Zulip development community.

Notable changes

  • The topic summarization feature now uses the OpenAI Python SDK, rather than litellm. Installations using TOPIC_SUMMARIZATION_MODEL must update their configuration: the setting now takes a plain model name, with OpenAI-compatible providers configured via the new TOPIC_SUMMARIZATION_API_BASE setting.
  • When the require_e2ee_push_notifications organization setting is enabled, legacy push notifications are now skipped entirely, rather than sent with redacted content.
  • Fixed signing up via an external authentication method (e.g., SAML) in organizations that require an invitation to join.
  • Fixed a long-standing bug where new users present in the LDAP directory could not sign up via an external authentication method (e.g., SAML).
  • Fixed an error preventing the data exports panel in organization settings from loading in organizations that had been imported from another Zulip server. This release includes a migration to fix problematic export records created by earlier versions.
  • Fixed quoting or viewing the source of some channel messages.
  • Fixed user typeaheads displaying “null” in place of a hidden email address.
  • Fixed the member list in user group settings being cut off, with no way to scroll through the full list of members.
  • Fixed a server error when saving channel descriptions containing Dropbox links.
  • Fixed GIF search returning an error for users with certain language settings.
  • Improved email gateway handling of long subjects. The full email subject is now included in the message body if the message topic is truncated.
  • Improved Mattermost import tooling to handle attachment files missing from the export.
  • Added an OIDC_REQUIRE_LIMIT_TO_SUBDOMAINS setting, like the existing SAML_REQUIRE_LIMIT_TO_SUBDOMAINS setting. If enabled, each configured OIDC identity provider is required to declare which subdomains it can be used for.
  • Added checks that the file upload storage backend is correctly configured.
  • Improved configuration checks and error messages for Helm and Docker deployments.
  • Fixed restore-backup to preserve symlinked uploads and configuration directories.
  • Fixed restore-backup failing on some systems, where the PostgreSQL user did not have permission to read the restore scripts.
  • Raised the locked-memory limit for PostgreSQL, fixing PostgreSQL 18 startup failures with io_uring on Linux kernels >= 6.14 (e.g., Ubuntu 26.04).
  • Fixed RabbitMQ setup in various scripts failing when a non-default RABBITMQ_VHOST was set.
  • Added a timeout and debug logging for downloads of Puppet dependencies during installation and upgrade.
  • Improved documentation for Docker-based deployments.
  • Updated Python dependencies.

Community

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