OpenAleph 5.1.0 Release notes

Read our release blog post

New feature

• A new tagging feature to organize team research workflows
• Enable or disable synonyms search per each search query with a toggle
• Helpful management commands for reingesting/-indexing specific documents

Breaking changes

After running OpenAleph 5.0.x for some time on our big instance, we noticed some performance improvements and a slight restructuring of the index would benefit even more the future development.

What’s changed:

• Reduced complexity of elasticsearch ingest/analyze pipeline
• Introduce a dedicated Page index that only stores child pages of documents. By separating this from the existing Pages index (introduced in 5.0) this decreases storage costs as we don’t need to store full text here for highlighting, as opposed to the Pages entity (which is the parent of 1 or more Page entities.)
• Reworked admin/deployment documentation

Because of the changed analyzers and the new Page index, this requires reindexing. Read our notes about re-indexing. It's not a blocker anymore.

Refer to the updated migration guide in our docs for how to upgrade from Aleph 3 and Aleph 4 to this most recent version.

Other improvements

• Updated migration guides and docker setup (example docker-compose.yml)
• Fixing bugs and regressions introduced by our 5.0.x releases
• Introduced optional ingest uri to seperate Elasticsearch ingest nodes (if running any custom processing pipelines on the cluster)

What's Changed

• Forcing the /expland API to set limit=SETTINGS.MAX_EXPAND_ENTITIES by @catileptic in #38
• Chore/backports by @simonwoerpel in #43
• Fix bug that stopped users from sharing investigation by @catileptic in #45
• Fix/expand api by @simonwoerpel in #42
• Feat/tagging by @simonwoerpel in #41
• Add permissions section to documentation by @jlstro in #48
• remove some typos/errors from makefile and docker compose to ensure smoother local dev deployment by @jlstro in #39
• chore: Update example docker-compose for pg 18 by @stchris in #51
• chore: typo & casing for consistency by @stchris in #52
• Release/5.1.0 by @simonwoerpel in #46

New Contributors

• @stchris made their first contribution in #51

Full Changelog: 5.0.1...5.1.0

This is the mandatory "upsi" release after a major version bump.

We discovered that shard routing for datasets was a bad idea under specific circumstances, so this is eliminated in this release to ensure a more balanced elasticsearch cluster.

Full Changelog: 5.0.0...5.0.1

🎉 Celebrating 80 Years of The Aleph 🎉

OpenAleph 5

On this day 80 years ago, Jorge Luis Borges published The Aleph, the story of a single point in space that contained all other points and revealed total, infinite knowledge. That idea inspired the name of Aleph, and today, we release OpenAleph 5. This is a major upgrade. Read the announcement

Summary

• Upgrade codebase to use FollowTheMoney 4.x.x
• Overhaul task queue using openaleph-procrastinate; add new design for status page
• Handle names using rigour, remove fingerprints (see blog post)
• Use ElasticSearch 9, change index structure, improve search and highlighting (see upcoming blog post)
• Add Discovery dashboard and closely-correlated names to UI, generate the data using significant terms aggregation from ElasticSearch (see blog post)
• Extract search-related code to openaleph-search; searches against ES can be performed using CLI commands
• Upgrade to psycopg3 for more reliable database connectivity
• Replace parts of servicelayer logic with anystore and ftmq

Credits

• Contributors @catileptic @jlstro @karinashed @simonwoerpel @riotbib and others
• Special thanks to Friedrich Lindenberg, Simon Willnauer and Mark Harwood
• ❤️ to our clients, supporters and the incredible open source community we are building upon ❤️

What's Changed

• Chore/new fingerprints by @simonwoerpel in #29
• Update UI and docs from alephclient to openaleph CLI by @riotbib in #32
• Next/improve search by @simonwoerpel in #30
• fix broken doc links by @jlstro in #33
• Switch task queue to procrastinate based on psql by @simonwoerpel in #25
• Bump opal-procrastinate && opal-servicelayer && prometheus-client by @catileptic in #35
• Add --queue flag to full reindex commands by @catileptic in #36
• Next/make search great again by @simonwoerpel in #34
• pass search query on in doc preview by @jlstro in #31

New Contributors

• @riotbib made their first contribution in #32

Full Changelog: 3.19.0...5.0.0

This uses followthemoney version 4. Learn more about the new FtM version: https://www.opensanctions.org/articles/2025-07-13-followthemoney/

ingest-file should be bumped to 3.24.0 to have ftm4 over there as well.

What's Changed

• fix image tags in doc by @jlstro in #26
• followthemoney 4 by @simonwoerpel in #28

Full Changelog: 3.18.6...3.19.0