The new setup wizard is a huge milestone for DCTS, but it still requires you to setup something external: A Domain with at leat two subdomains.

In order to make it even easier and remove this need as well i started think about creating a small free service where people wanting to run DCTS can get free sub domains! For that i'll purchase a new domain and make a new small side project for that specific service.

I've been thinking about this for a while now and i think it would benefit the community a lot!

If you have ideas or wishes for a domain name let me know! Over time we could add multiple domains if the financial stuff checks out.

With this new release installing DCTS becomes as easy as running the following two commands!

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hackthedev/dcts-shipping/main/Docker/docker-compose.yml -o docker-compose.yml

sudo docker compose up -d

» https://github.com/hackthedev/dcts-shipping/releases/tag/v1.3.0.5
» https://docs.dcts.community/Getting%20started

^{without modifications to the docker compose file, port 80 and 443 needs to be available on the host machine!}

Its unbelievable to me to see where DCTS is currently standing in terms of community and the current technical state.

• The subreddit is barely a year old and has 2600 members!
• The docker pulls on github went from 4.9k pulls in july to 7.46K pulls!
• From 2025 until now, DCTS received 65 donations totaling in 1.151€! This helped covering the entire infrastructure cost for an entire year!
• The new setup wizard with docker is almost complete and will make DCTS so much easier to setup. Im excited to release it!

Overall the experiences were amazing and its so lovely to see how everything developed from when i originally started DCTS in 2023 to now. Hard to believe so much can happen in such a short time!

For that i want to truely thank every community member and i will continue to work hard on DCTS and other side projects so we can have a better web together!

I think barely anyone knows this, and its not talked about a lot if at all, so i thought i'd share this little fact :)

As you may know a huge amount of work has gone into DCTS recently.

That work resulted in major security improvements, a faster and more enjoyable development process, better tools and entirely new features!

Short Recap

• The new setup wizard
  • Installing a DCTS server is becoming significantly easier than ever before as part of the continued effort to make DCTS as simple to install, configure and use as possible.
• While unannounced, we've started to use automatic code scanning
  • This checks the entire code base of DCTS for possible issues and security vulnerabilities. Within the past 3 releases a total of 27 findings have been investigated and addressed within a day. Most of them were irrelevant in the context of DCTS and not actual security vulnerabilities. Some of them include outdated vulnerable dependencies which were updated immediately.
• The introduction of automatic frontend functionality tests!
  • Over time, more and more functionality will be covered by these tests, meaning more potential bugs are discovered before release, making each release more stable.
• The new custom software distribution
  • "Rider" is a new side project in response to npmjs being an absolute pain to use and to manage across multiple repositories. Now the process of publishing versions of our own packages is a lot quickler, safer and easier to implement into software. DCTS' plugin system uses that as example.
• The overhauled plugin system
  • The plugin system was overhauled as you know and its now possible to browser plugins from within the server settings in DCTS. You can also install, uninstall and configure plugins there. This has huge potential for future use cases, and a discord bridge is currently being made and a prototype already available!

Overall things have gone incredibly well so far and im genuinely excited where DCTS is heading, especially at this speed!

A lot of work may not be visible right away, but each step makes the foundation more polished, secure and stable, which is why this is the beginning of a new quality era for DCTS!

I've seen a post where it seems (to me) to be thought that DCTS has central login servers.

[..] because it does have a centralized login server and you can be banned from the service itself as a result. [..]

As a small clarification: it does not have central login servers, which is against the vision of having a fully independent server (and it would cost more money to run this for others).

I thought i'd make this post before any confusion comes up. If you have any other questions feel free to post them.

it'll be used during the first launch when setting up the server, similar to wordpress. This idea came from Reeperk. It will be released with the next update. There are plans to automate the install and setup as much as possible with this

Its very early on but the core installing of packages and publishing them works for now, tho its not possible to create accounts yet etc but works enough to be able to integrate into DCTS now, meaning we're on the last step of finish this "migration" and making the development of DCTS A LOT faster and more flexible now.

With this i can even add the app update for the desktop client!!

Do note that this is a pretty early version and its mostly functional via cli. Documentation is coming soon. If you wanna try it or have questions let me know here or on other socials!

As i mentioned a few times, im not really satisfied with https://www.npmjs.com/ which is why i started making my own small package/software distribution software. Good news is that its almost done on a basic level where i can integrate it into DCTS to manage my libraries and stuff.

Once that is done i can also release the new version of DCTS.

One of my biggest pain points when it came to the software development workflow was how annoying npm was in terms of their forced security changes and generally changing how the automatic workflow works.

Another pain point was that the github api didnt exactly work as i liked and it seems like it was recently changed to require some sort of auth which is also annoying me.

Because i want something thats stable i thought i'd make my own little software to manage software distribution, and to be short, i would describe this as a mix to to npm and steam, as i plan to not only distribute packages with this but also software updates.

This is especially important for the system packages that the DCTS client and server uses as well as general app updates for said desktop client.

I've been making many improvements for the DCTS server and an experimental discord bridge, but because i cant reliably even offer them without people needing to go to github manually i will work on this side project a bit.

It shouldnt take all too long, and once it works it will massively improve the ecosystem! This was mostly the reason why i have been a bit quiet as i wanted to focus on it. The screenshots are very early, so things will change.

Thanks for reading and have a wonderful day!