HykuUP Roadmap: Hyku 6.0 released and other major features upcoming!

by | Apr 17, 2025

Hello Hyku Community!

We have a (very) late announcement, and some timely updates!

Through partnership with PALNI / PALCI (Hyku for Consortia) and Adventist Digital Library, and with support and collaboration from the Samvera Foundation, Notch8 is happy to announce the release of Hyku 6.0 on HykuUP, and available for access and use on Hyku Github!

Hyku 6 was a huge release.  Among many improvements, here are the bigges

t areas of added value:

  1. Valkyrie: This modernized data mapper replaces ActiveFedora, allowing Hyrax and Hykuhyku logo implementations to choose their own storage backends, going beyond Fedora 4 or 5, and enabling users to use various backends, such as Fedora, PostgreSQL, Solr, and even local disk. This allows for greater choice in storage solutions and potentially better performance or cost-effectiveness.
  2. Hyrax 5 upgrade: Hyku runs on Hyrax 5, so Hyku is now using Hyku 5.x and all the features and benefits that come with it!  (Hyrax5 Release announcement) (Hyrax 5 release notes)
  3. Knapsack: To understand Knapsack, it’s necessary to understand the problems it solves, and value it provides to Hyku users, especially in contrast with other Hyrax-based repository solutions – this deserves it’s own blog post.  Knapsack is a game-changer.  This is a wrapper on Hyku that eases upgrades (a source of pain for a lot of institutions using Hyku with some customizations) by providing a clear place for customizations, overrides, themes, and deployment scripts.  (To foreshadow the benefits, we’ve already heard positive feedback from the community after upgrading to 6.1)

Now for some updates – Hyku 6.1 and 6.2 are coming very soon.

Hyku 6.1 is an iterative release containing a number of bugfixes, UI improvements, bulkrax updates.  One more notable update is the full support for Google Analytics 4.

Hyku 6.2 will mark the official release of Flexible Metadata (Background on Julie Allinson and the Allinson Flex project) to the Hyku community (shoutout to Indiana University).  This gem allows for the configuration of custom metadata using a YAML file with M3 schema.  Previously, such custom configurations were complex to implement, and necessitated developer support, and made subsequent Hyku upgrades more challenging.  This feature largely addresses these issues, and tees up the platform for seamlessly-supporting authority-controlled vocabularies, and generally easier maintainability moving forward.

Here at Notch8, we’re excited to continue to support and build the Hyku product, and are excited to share these benefits with the Samvera Foundation community!