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News, announcements, and updates from the Hop3 project.

2026

July

  • July 31: Hop3 0.7 Released - Hop3 0.7 ships an app catalog you can install from, a Layer-7 web application firewall, email as a backing service, and upgrades that roll back when they fail; it verifies every bundled app by signing in, which turned out to matter more than any of them. The final deliverable release of the NGI Zero grant.
  • July 24: An App Catalog for Self-Hosting - Hop3's app catalog lets you browse real self-hosted applications in the dashboard and install one without reading its setup guide: an admin account is created for you and a sign-in is verified before the deploy reports success.
  • July 17: A Preliminary Benchmark: Nix Deploys Faster Than Docker - A first, single-sample benchmark of four build strategies across twenty applications. The Nix paths deploy 1.4× faster than Docker and land within 12–18% of a native build; thirty of thirty generated recipes rebuild bit-for-bit.
  • July 10: Email Is a Backing Service - Run a mail server or offload to a provider? The question picks the wrong axis: email is a backing service with a swappable backend, exactly like your database.
  • July 03: We Wrote a Web Application Firewall in Python - Hop3 0.7 puts a Layer-7 firewall in front of your apps. The engine behind it is LeWAF, a pure-Python OWASP Core Rule Set implementation we wrote and released standalone.

June

  • June 24: Hop3 0.6.1 Released - Hop3 0.6.1 consolidates the deploy-target model into a single "context" noun, pins nixpkgs across every Nix recipe for reproducible builds, ships an experimental email/SMTP addon, and lands a broad stability pass across the test lab, CI, and app packaging.
  • June 22: Hop3 0.6.0 Released - Hop3 0.6.0 adds per-app resource limits and volumes, a much richer addon-management surface, a signed app catalog, and publishes the full design record: the platform-capability layer on top of 0.5's consolidation.
  • June 19: The Test Lab: Making the Nightly Suite Legible - The nightly Test Lab: a Hop3-hosted web app that provisions cloud servers, runs the whole suite, and turns every failure into a queryable, trend-aware report. (Part 5 of 5)
  • June 19: The Test Runner: Why hop3-test Exists - Why Hop3 needed a bespoke test runner beyond pytest, what it takes to run it, and the one deploy-and-verify path it owns. (Part 4 of 5)
  • June 19: Testable Docs: Tutorials That Run Themselves - How Hop3 keeps its tutorials correct: validoc runs the documentation's own commands against a real server and asserts the results. (Part 3 of 5)
  • June 19: The Demos: One Artifact, Three Jobs - Why every Hop3 demo is a tutorial, a screencast, and a regression test all at once, and how the launcher runs them. (Part 2 of 5)
  • June 19: How Hop3 is Tested - A map of how Hop3 tests itself: three runners, three layers, four speed tiers, and why each one exists. (Part 1 of 5)
  • June 08: Hop3 0.5.0 Released - Hop3 0.5.0 is a consolidation release: a reworked CLI, reproducible Nix builds, four waves of security hardening, and deploy failures you can actually diagnose.
  • June 03: Hop3 at OW2Con 2026: NGI Zero Success Stories - Talk in the NGI Zero 'Success Stories' session at OW2Con 2026: what the Nix Integration for Hop3 grant delivered, and what comes next.

May

April

March

February

January

2025

December

  • December 05: Hop3 at OSXP 2025 - Talk at Open Source Experience on achieving strategic autonomy through simplified self-hosting.

June

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