Contao news

On February 17, the latest version of Contao Manager was released to allow the installation of Contao 4.13 LTS. Now it's time to examine on the new features.

Maintenance mode

The system-wide maintenance mode can now be activated in the Contao Manager. This works for all Contao versions starting with Contao 4.4. In the case of Contao 4.13 and thanks to the completely revised maintenance mode (see

Improved installation wizard

The installation wizard has been revised and support for the public directory has been added. Starting with Contao 4.12, the public directory can be used instead of the web directory. This is the new recommended way and complies with the current Symfony standard.

If the web or public directory is already configured correctly but not empty, the Contao Manager helps to resolve the conflict and now also allows the installation into a non-empty directory.

Updating the ecosystem to Composer 2.2

As of now, the Contao Manager as well as the Composer Resolver Cloud use Composer 2.2, which again leads to huge performance improvements. Martin has already scrutinized my work on Composer 2.2 some time ago and now we can all benefit from it. The effects on the Cloud side are already clearly visible: Jobs now take just over 10 seconds instead of about a minute and RAM consumption dropped from an average of about 1.5 GB to a ridiculous ~130 MB by comparison!

This will allow us to save further costs at the Contao Association or, if necessary, to significantly increase the number of workers in the Cloud without generating additional costs. Especially when releasing security updates, this should help us a lot. Whether this will be necessary at all remains to be seen. After all, each individual worker is now almost 6x faster.

PS: My personal goal is to break the sound barrier of 10 seconds per job for Contao. I think that could be feasible.

So can I disable using the Cloud in the Contao Manager now?

With an average of 130 MB of memory, the question begs whether you still need the Cloud in this form or whether you should deactivate it in the Contao Manager. We leave the decision up to you, but we will continue to provide the Cloud in any case. It runs extremely stable and reliable and also gives us a great insight about the PHP versions in use. Also note that depending on the constellation, it will still consume well over 130 MB of RAM.

Speaking of the Cloud: There are costs for servers and cloud services, but also for the development of the Manager. With your support for Contao, you help to cover them.

Have fun!