This morning’s system update went pretty smoothly, and we have some cool new stuff to announce:
Let’s Encrypt certificates with automatic renewal¶
You can now get an HTTPS certificate for your custom domain using Let’s Encrypt without all that tedious mucking around with dehydrated – and you don’t need to remember to renew the certificate either, or even set up a scheduled task to renew your certificate for you.
Just go to the new “HTTPS certificate” line in the “Security” section of the “Web” tab. You’ll see a pencil icon next to the kind of certificate you have (which will probably be “None” or “Custom”). Click the pencil, and you’ll see that there’s an option called “Auto-renewed Let’s Encrypt certificate”. If you select that and click “Save”, we’ll get a fresh certificate for your site from Let’s Encrypt – and well before it expires, our system will automatically renew it for you.
If you have a certificate that you’ve bought from some other organisation like Comodo or GoDaddy, you can also configure it from here – select the “Custom certificate” option, and you’ll get input fields where you can copy and paste the private key and the combined certificate.
We have detailed instructions with screenshots on the help site.
The old ways of setting up a certificate still work – you can use dehydrated, or get a certificate from a third party like GoDaddy, and upload everything using the command-line scripts.
MySQL 5.7¶
New accounts created from today will use MySQL 5.7. If you’re still on 5.6 and would like your databases moved over to a 5.7-compatible server, get in touch over support@pythonanywhere.com – the move won’t happen until early next year, though.
Fixes for Firefox and Selenium from website code¶
Several people reported a problem where you could not run Selenium from website code from a Hacker account – you needed a Web Dev account or better. This was a bug, not a feature, so we fixed it :-)
CPU sharing enhancements¶
There was a problem where people who had used all of their CPU allowance could continue to use lots of server resources; this isn’t something that would have been useful for anyone or that we think anyone was doing deliberately – it would only happen if they started processes which did nothing and then restarted. So it just meant that if one person had a certain kind of bug in their code and then went into the tarpit, they’d use up CPU that could have been put to better use by people who were actually trying to run working code :-) We’ve put a fix in place to stop that from happening.
And that’s it!¶
Of course, there were the normal minor tweaks and bugfixes, but those are the highlights. A very happy holiday season to everyone, and we look forward to being able to show you some cool new stuff in the new year!