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What's new in Starsky v0.8.0?

· 4 min read
Dion
Dion
Software developer

Version 0.8.0 is a significant release centered on upgrading to .NET 10, bringing new virtual folder mapping capabilities, and a series of quality and reliability improvements. Here's what's changed since v0.7.22:

🚨 Breaking Changes​

  • Upgrade to .NET 10
    • Starsky's backend now runs on .NET 10 (Runtime 10.0.11, SDK 10.0.400). .NET 10 is the current major version and brings performance improvements across the board.

🆕 New Features​

  • Virtual Storage Folder Mappings (Symlink)

    • You can now define custom storage folder mappings in the application settings. This lets you map a virtual sub-path inside Starsky's library to a physical folder located anywhere on disk — without requiring OS-level symlinks.
    • This is useful for attaching an external drive, a network share, or a dedicated archive folder to your Starsky library without moving files or changing how the OS sees them.
    • The mapping is fully managed from the Preferences UI under a new Storage Folder Mappings panel.
    • Safety guardrails prevent mapping to sensitive system directories (e.g. /etc, /System, C:\Windows) to avoid accidental exposure of OS files.
    • The disk watcher picks up changes inside mapped folders automatically, so new files appear in the index just like any other library file.

  • HTML Publish: <figure> and LargeImageDefaultSrc template (PR #3217)

    • The static HTML publish feature gains a new embedded view LargeImageDefaultSrc.cshtml and a Legacy.cshtml fallback template.
    • Images in published pages are now wrapped in a semantic <figure> element, improving accessibility and allowing finer CSS control over captions and layout.
    • The published index page now uses a 1000 px max-width container (up from 500 px) for a better reading experience on modern displays.

🛠️ Bug Fixes & Improvements​

  • ExifTool guard: prevent accidental auto-download (PR #3223)

    • Added a guard in ExifToolService that validates the ExifTool binary before attempting to use it. If the binary is absent or fails a basic sanity check, Starsky logs a warning instead of silently falling back to an auto-download, which could be unexpected in restricted environments.

  • IOException AppSettings robustness (PR #3222)

    • The AppSettings model now handles IOException when reading configuration, rather than propagating a raw exception on startup. This improves reliability on systems where the config file is temporarily locked (e.g. during a deploy or config rotation).

  • Cypress E2E test reliability on Windows (PR #3210)

    • Fixed a flaky end-to-end test in the detail-view upload flow. On Windows, blur() triggers an asynchronous FetchPost to /starsky/api/update, but the test didn't wait for that network round-trip before reloading. The test now explicitly waits for the network call, making it reliable on both Linux and Windows CI runners.

🗃️ Infrastructure & Tooling​

  • RabbitMQ.Client updated to 7.2.2 (PR #3215)

    • Keeps the message queue client up to date with the latest upstream patches.

  • Code quality pass for .NET 10 (PR #3205, #3207, #3208, #3209)

    • A series of SonarQube-driven code quality improvements were applied alongside the .NET 10 migration, reducing technical debt and bringing the codebase in line with .NET 10 analyzer rules.

  • Swagger .NET updated (PR #3202)

    • The API documentation tooling has been updated to match the new .NET 10 stack.

⚠️ Upgrade Notes​

  1. Install the .NET 10 runtime on your server or update your Docker image before upgrading. This is only required for development, by default all binaries are self-contained
  2. If you run ExifTool in an air-gapped or restricted environment, verify the binary is in place before starting the service — the new guard will log a warning on startup if it cannot be found, rather than silently auto-downloading.
  3. If you use the HTML publish feature (starskyWebHtmlCli), re-publish any existing profiles to pick up the corrected width/height values and the new <figure> markup.

For the full list of changes, see history.md.