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What is Akeeba Release System?

Akeeba Release System (ARS for short) is a download manager for Joomla!™ 4, specifically designed for software distribution. It is used by us, Akeeba Ltd, to distribute our software. It has been optimized for large scale, versioned, software downloads.

IMPORTANT This documentation only covers Akeeba Release System 7 and later for Joomla 4. Older versions for Joomla 3 and earlier are not covered by this documentation.

Key features:

• The software used by Joomla! for its own releases.

• Core MVC and native Bootstrap 5 styling with plenty of CSS classes for easy customisation of its styling.

• Sensible hierarchical organization of your downloads into Categories, Releases (versions) and Items (files).

• Out-of-the box SEF URLs, using Joomla's built-in SEF router.

• Excellent performance.

• Integration with Joomla! access control (user groups & access levels) for limiting access to downloads only to specific subscribers.

• Allows you to add files either stored on your site's folder structure or directly link to externally hosted files, e.g. files on a CDN, GitHub Releases etc.

• Automatically determines the file size and file hashes of all files you add to it.

• Automatically fills in common information for Items based on predefined templates.

• Update streams. Offer updates to your software in two formats: INI files easily usable by any and all programming languages or automatic creation of Joomla! XML extension update streams. As soon as you publish a new version, all your clients using a modern version of Joomla! will be able to automatically upgrade to it. No extra file creation or manual action is necessary. Coupled with Akeeba Release Maker your entire extension publish process can be shortened to a single command.

• Update streams can be minified to reduce the transferred size, very important on extensions with hundreds of thousands to millions of installations.

• Update streams can be pruned based on the information determined by our Version Compatibility component, only including the unique versions displayed in the compatibility matrix. This reduces the number of versions listed, decreasing the XML update size by up to 90% on extensions with a long history spanning several years to over a decade. Smaller updates mean the total transferred size is reduced which is very important on extensions with hundreds of thousands to millions of installations.

• Joomla API application support. Manage your categories, releases and items remotely using the JSON API application included in Joomla 4.

• Allows for automatic updates of paid software (restricted downloads). You can authenticate automatic downloads of restricted access items by passing the username and password or a secure Download ID to the URL. In Joomla 4 the Download ID is referred to as the "download key".

• Release notes.

• All HTML fields use the Joomla!'s WYSIWYG editor for editing and support content plugins.

• Supports using custom HTML files for displaying your repository, including support for content plugins so you can show the latest versions in the main download page of your site. You no longer need complicated layout overrides, just write some HTML and off you go!

• Download logging: item, user, authentication status, IP address and HTTP Referer. This can be used for security purposes as well as to provide evidence against fraudulent refund requests on the pretext that they never received your software (in a way that's compliant with the EU GDPR and EU Consumer Protection Directive).

• Development / nightly releases using the BleedingEdge categories feature. Just upload files to your server by SFTP and ARS will automatically create and publish new releases and download items.

• GPL v3 software. We value your Freedom of choice and transparency in our code.

Important

The software is provided free of charge for everyone to use. However, we do not offer any kind of support, free or paid.

Notes for upgrades

Akeeba Release System 7 and later is only compatible with Joomla 4.0 and later. Check the compatibility information on our site for information about which version of ARS is compatible with each version of Joomla and PHP.

Template overrides for ARS 6 and earlier versions are no longer compatible with ARS 7 and later since the underlying MVC framework changed from Akeeba FOF to core Joomla! 4 MVC and the underlying CSS framework changed from Akeeba FEF to Boostrap 5 (which is shipped with Joomla; we include BS5 compatible classes but your template is ultimately responsible for loading BS5 or a compatibility layer for it).

The Download ID module has been removed. You can use Joomla's built-in Custom HTML module together with the “Content - Download ID” plugin shipped with ARS. On the plus side, you can now format it any way you please!

Visual Groups have been removed since version 5. You can use the custom HTML feature in the Repository view to visually group releases any way you want, without any of the restrictions placed by visual groups.

Support for Amazon S3 has been removed since version 5. You can always create a CloudFront distribution or enter the HTTP(S) URL for items stored in Amazon S3. This will obviously only work for publicly available files. If you want a file to be restricted by membership to specific Joomla user groups you need to store the files on your server.

Access rules have made a comeback since version 7 (they were removed in versions 5 and 6). You can now determine who can manage the Categories and, by extent, the Releases and Items in them.

Subscription level support has been removed as of version 5. This was pointless and tying your downloads to the specific membership extension you were using. Use Joomla user groups instead. The subscription level support was a leftover from Joomla 1.5 which lacked custom user group support.