What's New
New updates and improvements to Hatchbox.io
Automatic SSL Redirects
Improvement
We've refactored our Caddy configurations to take advantage of the built-in automatic SSL redirects with Caddy. This means your applications won't need to handle SSL redirects on their own anymore. Plus, static sites will now always be served over SSL.
For load balanced clusters, HTTP access is enabled on the web servers. The load balancer will strip the SSL connection and use HTTP on the local network for proxying requests.
Applying this update
To apply these changes to existing applications, click the "Update Caddy" button under your app's settings page.
If you still need HTTP access publicly, you can turn on the "Disable https redirects" feature in your Cluster's Settings.
ℹ️ Cloudflare users will want to ensure their domain's SSL mode is set to Full. If set to Flexible, this change will cause infinite redirects as Cloudflare will use HTTP to proxy to your site.
Caddy 2.11.2
Update
We've upgraded Caddy to the latest version, 2.11.2, which includes bugfixes and a couple security fixes: https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/releases/tag/v2.11.2
This also upgrades the Hetzner plugin to use the new Cloud DNS API for verifying wildcard SSL domains. You'll need to migrate from the DNS Console to the new Cloud DNS API if you're using Hetzner. See their documentation on how to migrate: https://docs.hetzner.com/networking/dns/migration-to-hetzner-console/process/
Automatic Windows Ruby Shebang Rewrites
Improvement
If you're a Windows user, your Rails and other binstubs might use "ruby.exe". Deploying this to Linux will obviously cause a problem since it can't find or run Windows executables.
Hatchbox will now detect `ruby.exe` in the shebang of your binstubs and rewrite them to `ruby` to make them Linux compatible during your deployments. 🎉
Hatchbox will now detect `ruby.exe` in the shebang of your binstubs and rewrite them to `ruby` to make them Linux compatible during your deployments. 🎉
Removing SASL for Memcached by default
Update
If you're using the Dalli gem for Memcached support in Ruby, you may have noticed that the latest major version (5.0) has removed SASL support as well as the binary protocol in favor of the meta protocol for memcached.
Since memcached only runs on the internal private network and is also firewalled, new memcached instances won't have SASL configured since it already runs in a trusted network. This will make it automatically compatible with Dalli 5.0+.
This change only applies to new Memcached instances. To remove SASL for existing memcached instances, you can run the following script as root:
Since memcached only runs on the internal private network and is also firewalled, new memcached instances won't have SASL configured since it already runs in a trusted network. This will make it automatically compatible with Dalli 5.0+.
This change only applies to new Memcached instances. To remove SASL for existing memcached instances, you can run the following script as root:
#!/usr/bin/env bash set -eou pipefail # Remove SASL config sed -i "/^-S/d" /etc/memcached.conf # Restart systemctl restart memcached
Check out the Dalli 5 upgrade guide for more details.
Better Language Support
Improvement
We've been hard at work refactoring Hatchbox's internals for faster, more streamlined deployments. Some of the improvements we've made that are now live today:
- No longer installs default Ruby or Node.js versions to speed up deployments
- Added corepack support for Node.js deployments to support Yarn v2+, PNPM and more
- Added bundle clean for optimizing disk usage after upgrading gems
- Added assets:clean to optimize disk usage for Rails deployments
If you run into any issues, visit the Help section and send us a message with details about your app and any relevant logs and we'll get it fixed.
Ruby 4.0.1
New
Ruby 4.0.1 is now precompiled and ready to use for deploying on Hatchbox!
Check out the Ruby 4.0.1 release notes.
Check out the Ruby 4.0.1 release notes.
Ruby 4.0.0 & 3.4.8
New
It's Christmas again and that means a new Ruby release. This year is 4.0.0 along with a maintenance release on 3.4.
https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2025/12/25/ruby-4-0-0-released/
https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2025/12/25/ruby-4-0-0-released/
Caddy 2.10
Update
We've updated to the latest Caddy version, 2.10. This includes many bugfixes and some new features. This also includes updates to all the Caddy DNS modules for wildcard certificates with LetsEncrypt. Check out the release notes for more details.
To update your servers to the latest Caddy, visit your Server in the Hatchbox UI and click "Update" to update to the latest configuration.
To update your servers to the latest Caddy, visit your Server in the Hatchbox UI and click "Update" to update to the latest configuration.
September 18th, 2025 Incident
Update
On September 18th, 2025, Hatchbox was unavailable for several hours.
What happened
We discovered the disk for the Hatchbox server was full. This was due to some heavy usage overnight writing a significant amount of logs from deployments.
We also saw errors that the database host was inaccessible. This could have been related to the disk being full, but seemed unrelated. The database was connecting to the same server over it's private IP address and was failing to resolve the IP. It's possible this was caused by network maintenance in the datacenter overnight.
Our uptime monitoring checked for a 200 OK response from https://app.hatchbox.io. However, the homepage doesn't query the database meaning the uptime check was successful even during the outage.
We also saw errors that the database host was inaccessible. This could have been related to the disk being full, but seemed unrelated. The database was connecting to the same server over it's private IP address and was failing to resolve the IP. It's possible this was caused by network maintenance in the datacenter overnight.
Our uptime monitoring checked for a 200 OK response from https://app.hatchbox.io. However, the homepage doesn't query the database meaning the uptime check was successful even during the outage.
Going forward
To restore free disk space, we cleared several caches on the server and older deployment logs from Hatchbox applications. This included Rubygems, bootsnap, APT, Journalctl, and others to free up some disk space.
However, to fully free up the disk space, we needed to vacuum the Postgres database. Since vacuum full requires twice the amount of disk space, we mounted a volume, moved the tablespace, vacuumed the table, and restored the tablespace back to the server. This freed up over 50% of disk space on the server. We also vacuumed some other tables and started cleaning up PGHero stats every 14 days to reduce disk usage for it.
To fix the database IP address issue, a restart of the server resolved the issue. However, the Hatchbox database is running locally and the database host was misconfigured to use the server's private IP address instead of localhost. This introduces a dependency on the private network that is not necessary so change this should be more reliable and faster.
We have also modified our uptime check to hit a page that accesses the database to ensure the application is running fully.
Reliability is a huge priority for us to ensure that you have a good experience with Hatchbox, so we'll be improving our own infrastructure to ensure these types of problems don't happen again. We'll also be taking these lessons and applying them to Hatchbox to protect your own apps and servers from the same issues.
However, to fully free up the disk space, we needed to vacuum the Postgres database. Since vacuum full requires twice the amount of disk space, we mounted a volume, moved the tablespace, vacuumed the table, and restored the tablespace back to the server. This freed up over 50% of disk space on the server. We also vacuumed some other tables and started cleaning up PGHero stats every 14 days to reduce disk usage for it.
To fix the database IP address issue, a restart of the server resolved the issue. However, the Hatchbox database is running locally and the database host was misconfigured to use the server's private IP address instead of localhost. This introduces a dependency on the private network that is not necessary so change this should be more reliable and faster.
We have also modified our uptime check to hit a page that accesses the database to ensure the application is running fully.
Reliability is a huge priority for us to ensure that you have a good experience with Hatchbox, so we'll be improving our own infrastructure to ensure these types of problems don't happen again. We'll also be taking these lessons and applying them to Hatchbox to protect your own apps and servers from the same issues.
We know these things create tough times for everyone and appreciated your understanding and patience while we got this resolved. Thanks as always for using Hatchbox and we apologize for any headache this may have caused.
Ruby 3.4.6
New
We've precompiled Ruby 3.4.6 for easy deployments with Hatchbox.
https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2025/09/16/ruby-3-4-6-released/
https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2025/09/16/ruby-3-4-6-released/
Added Bun.lock detection
Improvement
We've improved our Bun support by now detecting `bun.lock` alongside `bun.lockb`. If detected, we will install either the Bun version in .tool-versions or the latest version.
Chrome Hangs While In Maintenance Mode
Fix
We recently updated Maintenance Mode to return a 503 HTTP status code. This signals to clients that the application is temporarily unavailable. This is helpful for crawlers like GoogleBot to not index the app while it's in maintenance mode and to come back later.
You may have noticed that Chrome hung indefinitely when requesting an app in maintenance mode. We've added the Retry-After header to signal to Chrome to come back alter instead of retrying the request automatically. Chrome users will now see the Maintenance Mode page rendered immediately without hanging.
You may have noticed that Chrome hung indefinitely when requesting an app in maintenance mode. We've added the Retry-After header to signal to Chrome to come back alter instead of retrying the request automatically. Chrome users will now see the Maintenance Mode page rendered immediately without hanging.
Maintenance mode now renders 503 status
Improvement
We've updated maintenance mode to render 503 Service Unavailable to properly denote the status of the application so that clients can be aware of maintenance and retry later.
Previously, when enabling maintenance mode for an application, the maintenance page was served with status 200 OK. While this worked, it wasn't the correct HTTP response and doesn't convey the maintenance status to clients.
Previously, when enabling maintenance mode for an application, the maintenance page was served with status 200 OK. While this worked, it wasn't the correct HTTP response and doesn't convey the maintenance status to clients.
Ruby 3.3.9 and 3.2.9
New
Ruby 3.3.9 and 3.2.9 have been released and are now precompiled for use on Hatchbox.
These releases contain security fixes, so please upgrade!
https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2025/07/24/ruby-3-3-9-released/
https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2025/07/24/ruby-3-2-9-released/
These releases contain security fixes, so please upgrade!
https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2025/07/24/ruby-3-3-9-released/
https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2025/07/24/ruby-3-2-9-released/
Ruby 3.4.5 support
New
Hatchbox now has Ruby 3.4.5 precompiled and ready to use in your applications. See the Ruby release notes for more information.
Easier cluster transfers between your accounts
Improvement
We've introduced a new way to transfer clusters between accounts you own. Rather than forcing all transfers to go through email, you can now select an account and instantly transfer it.
You can still use email to transfer a cluster to another user where you're not part of their team. This is a common situation where you might be leaving a company or client and need to transfer ownership without being part of their account going forward.
You can still use email to transfer a cluster to another user where you're not part of their team. This is a common situation where you might be leaving a company or client and need to transfer ownership without being part of their account going forward.
New default Ruby & Node.js versions
Update
We've updated the default Ruby version to 3.4.4 and Node.js to 22.16.0. These versions are only used if your application doesn't specify a version.
Git LFS support
New
Git Large File Storage (LFS) is now installed by default on servers. This allows large files to be stored externally but still versioned with Git. This makes it possible to store files larger than 100MB in your repository. Git LFS works seamlessly in Hatchbox so you don't have to do anything special to deploy a repository that's using it.
Learn more at https://git-lfs.com/
Learn more at https://git-lfs.com/
Ruby 3.4.4 Available
New
We've precompiled the newest Ruby version, 3.4.4, to make deployments faster.
https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2025/05/14/ruby-3-4-4-released/
https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2025/05/14/ruby-3-4-4-released/
Stripe Billing changes
Update
We're upgrading to Stripe's latest Billing Meters API for tracking usage in Hatchbox. Pricing and everything remains the same, we're just updating our internal tracking to use Stripe's new APIs now that Usage Records are deprecated. Your next invoice will begin tracking hours of usage rather than seconds of usage. This will help make pricing a bit easier to understand on invoices.
If you notice any issues, let us know!
If you notice any issues, let us know!
Exciting stuff coming very soon!