Web Asset Server 2.0 Release Announcement

Announcements & News
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SpecifyCollectionsConsortium
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Web Asset Server 2.0 Release Announcement

2.0 (14 November 2025)

The Specify Web Asset Server 2.0 has released, bringing with it a number of major improvements to its dependencies.

Specify Cloud-managed asset servers will receive an update automatically this Sunday, November 16th.

[!note] Tagged Releases

Starting with this update, releases for the Web Asset Server will be numbered and tagged on GitHub: https://github.com/specify/web-asset-server/tags

All releases are available via Docker Hub: specifyconsortium/specify-asset-service - Docker Image

This release is available via the v2 tag today!

The previous release of the Web Asset is now available as v1.

Documentation

Added

  • Adds instructions in the README for deploying alongside Specify 7
  • Adds a utility script for managing collection directories

Fixed

  • Fixes an issue where PDF thumbnails were not being generated (#9)

Dependency Updates

Library / Software Old Version New Version Old Version Notes New Version Notes
Ubuntu 18.04 22.04 EOL May 2023 EOL Apr 2027
Python 3.6 3.12 EOL Dec 2023 (Latest Security) EOL Oct 2028
ExifRead 2.3.1 3.5.1 Released Aug 7, 2020 (Latest) Released Aug 23, 2025
Paste 3.4.4 3.10.1 Released Sep 9, 2020 (Latest) Released May 1, 2024
sh 1.14.0 2.2.2 Released Aug 28, 2020 (Latest) Released Feb 24, 2025
Bottle >=0.12.23,<=0.13 >=0.12.23,<=0.13 (0.12.25) Released Mar 4, 2023
boto3 - >=1.26.0,<2.0 (1.40.46) Released Oct 6, 2025

You can find the source code on the GitHub Web Asset Server repository.

If you need more information about the Web Asset Server or have any questions, feel free to email support@specifysoftware.org!

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Hi, I updated my Specify 7 testing environment this morning to SP7 v7.11.3 and MariaDB 11.8 LTS. It works fine. I’d like to check which version of the Web Asset Server I’m currently using. I deployed the Dockerized version of Specify, using the specifyconsortium/specify-asset-service image (no tags).

Can you confirm whether this corresponds to version 1 or version 2 of the Asset Server? Is there a way for me to check the version that I’m using? specifyconsortium/specify-asset-service - Docker Image | Docker Hub

Thanks

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Hi @Heryk,

Thanks for your question! Until today, the newest version of the specifyconsortium/specify-asset-service:latest tag was a version last pushed on October 28, 2020.

This is now identified as v1.0.0 while today’s release is v2.0.0. If you have not pulled the latest tagged release explicitly (specifyconsortium/specify-asset-service:v2), it will default to the latest tag. If you have not pulled an image within the past 2 hours, you are likely on the release from Oct 2020.

You can check if you are on the latest version by running cat /home/specify/requirements.txt inside of the web-asset-server container:

On v2.0.0:

$ cat /home/specify/requirements.txt
ExifRead==3.5.1
Paste==3.10.1
sh==2.2.2
Bottle>=0.12.23,<=0.13
boto3>=1.26.0,<2.0
boto3-stubs>=1.26.0,<2.0

On v1.0.0:

$ cat /home/specify/requirements.txt
ExifRead==2.3.1
Paste==3.4.4
sh==1.14.0
Bottle==0.12.18
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