We're heading into the spooky season, which means Hacktoberfest has also started. This is a month-long celebration of open source; encouraging developers to contribute to open source projects. If you're struggling to find good projects, you might find some inspiration here. There's everything from fun side hustles, to groundbreaking technology. Let's take a look at GitHub's picks for this month's Release Radar; a roundup of the open source projects that have shipped major version updates.

Redwood 8.0

If you're looking to swiftly create some React-based web applications, then Redwood is for you. It's the perfect framework if you're looking to mock up something for a hackathon, a startup, or to create a decent prototype to show off your next big idea. The latest version brings background jobs, a way for you to create and execute background jobs within your React-based app; send an email or process an image. There's now support for Docker, and updates for the latest versions of React, Prisma, Vite, and more. Check out the full release blog for all the details.

Express 5.0

More frameworks! This one is for Node.js applications, and is designed to be minimalist. There are tonnes of changes to the latest version of Express, including new document beta releases expectations, a new threat model, added CodeQL (SAST), support for Node 22, and lots more. Check out all the changes, as well as new contributors, in the Express release notes.

const express = require('express')
const app = express()

app.get('/', function (req, res) {
  res.send('Hello World')
})

app.listen(3000)

date-fns 4.0

JavaScript seems to be the flavour of the month, and here's another JavaScript project for you. date-fns provides the most comprehensive and consistent toolset for manipulating JavaScript dates in a browser & Node.js. The latest version comes ten years after the very first release. There are no breaking changes in the release, and it comes with added time zone support, meaning you can select which time zone to make calculations in. There are some changes to functional arguments and a few fixes. Read up on all the changes in the release notes.

import { addDays, startOfDay } from "date-fns";
import { tz } from "@date-fns/tz";

startOfDay(addDays(Date.now(), 5, { in: tz("Asia/Singapore") }));
//=> "2024-09-16T00:00:00.000+08:00"

Prefect 3.0

Let's switch gears from JavaScript to Python. Prefect is a workflow orchestration framework for building data pipelines in Python. Workflow activity is tracked and can be monitored with a self-hosted server, or managed dashboard. The latest release is now 10x faster, event-driven, and comes with a robust API. These new pre-built event-driven workflows are available in Prefect-Open-Source. Your data can now tell your workflows when they are ready to be processed. Check out all the few features and updates in the Prefect blog post.

from prefect.automations import Automation
from prefect.events.actions import PauseDeployment
from prefect.events.schemas.automations import EventTrigger

my_automation = Automation(
    name="Pause critical workflow",
    trigger=EventTrigger(
        expect={"prefect.flow-run.Failed"},
        match={"prefect.resource.id": ["prefect.flow-run.*"]},
        match_related={
            "prefect.resource.role": "flow",
            "prefect.resource.name": [
                "critical_workflow",
            ],
        },
    ),
    actions=[PauseDeployment(source="inferred")],
)

my_automation.create()

PacketFence 14.0

Looking for a network access control (NAC) solution? Then look no further than PacketFence. This solution includes a captive-portal for registration and remediation, centralised wired, wireless and VPN management, industry-leading BYOD capabilities, 802.1X and RBAC support, integrated network anomaly detection with layer-2 isolation of problematic devices. PacketFence version 14 brings support for Debian 12 and OSQuery, as well as some neat enhancements including Firewall SSO clustering load-balancing, and cluster support for domain.conf.

Kingfisher 8.0

I'm not much of an Apple user, but Swift developers will love this. Kingfisher is a library for downloading and caching images on the web. It includes asynchronous image downloading and caching, multi-layer hybrid cache for both memory and disk, and some useful image processors and filters. The latest version includes support for Swift Concurrency, compatibility with Swift 6, and backward language compatibility. Check out all the changes, including some breaking changes in the release notes.

n 10.0

Short for "interactively manage Node.js versions", n helps you manage your version of Node.js without any profile setup, subshells, or API hook. The latest version is mainly due to the use of jq over node for reading package.json. n can also avoid a network lookup if either auto or engine finds a specified numeric version.

Verdaccio 6.0

Are you tired of needing an entire database just to get started? Verdaccio changes all that with an out-of-the-box database you can use for your local private npm registry. It can proxy other registers, and cache downloaded modules. The newest update drops support for Node.js 16, taking minimum support for Node.js 18.

🤗 Datasets 3.0

From Hugging Face, come 🤗 Datasets, the largest hub of ready-to-use datasets for machine learning models. The latest update comes with support for Polars functions and NumPy2. There's some deprecated code and cache changes. There's improvements to tutorial with a link for loading datasets and some fixes. Read up on all the changes, fixes, and new contributors in the 🤗 Datasets release notes.

Realm 20.0

From the team at MongoDB comes Realm, a mobile database that runs directly inside phones, tablets, or wearables. It's built for mobile, and designed for offline use. The latest release comes with built-in Swift 6 language mode, and Xcode 16 support. Some breaking changes include removal of Atlas App Services and Atlas Device Sync functionality, Strings and Data now considered different types and thus queries won't match one another, and Realms are no longer autoreleased when initialised. Dig into all the updates in the Realm changelog.

Release Radar September

Well, that’s all for this edition. Hopefully you have some ideas on projects you'd like to contribute to for Hacktoberfest. Thanks to everyone who submitted a project to be featured. We loved reading about the great things you're all working on. Whether your project is featured here or not, congratulations to everyone who shipped a new release 🎉, regardless of whether you shipped your project's first version, or you launched 20.0.

If you missed our last Release Radar, check out the amazing open source projects that released major version projects in August. We love featuring projects submitted by the community. If you're working on an open source project and shipping a major version soon, we'd love to hear from you. Check out the Release Radar repository, and submit your project to be featured in the GitHub Release Radar.