The Flower team is excited to announce the release of Flower 1.40 stable, packed with new updates!
Flower is a friendly framework for collaborative AI and data science. It makes novel approaches such as federated learning, federated evaluation, federated analytics, and fleet learning accessible to a wide audience of researchers and engineers.
Thanks to our contributors
We would like to give our special thanks to all the contributors who made the new version of Flower possible (in git shortlog order):
Charles Beauville, Chong Shen Ng, Daniel J. Beutel, Daniel Nata Nugraha, Dimitris Stripelis, Heng Pan, Istiaque Ahmed, Javier, Julian Rußmeyer, Ruth Galindo, Stephane Moroso, Taner Topal
What's new?
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Connect SuperNodes to the Fleet API over HTTP (#8301, #8303, #8304, #8305, #8307, #8308, #8309, #8310, #8311, #8313, #8314, #8315, #8316, #8317, #8318, #8320, #8321, #8322, #8325, #8333)
SuperNodes now connect to the Fleet API over HTTP on the SuperLink's shared --host and --port, using port 8000 by default. The HTTP API supports SuperNode authentication, version checks, and event logging. SuperLink no longer enables the gRPC Fleet API by default, its --fleet-api-type and --fleet-api-address options are deprecated, and SuperNode no longer accepts the --grpc-rere and --grpc-adapter transport options.
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Search Slack and query Notion meeting notes (#8264, #8290, #8306, #8323)
Search public Slack channels and, when access allows, private conversations. You can also filter Notion AI meeting notes to find relevant notes, with clearer guidance on finding and reading their contents.
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Continue conversations in @flwrlabs/agent app (#8274)
The @flwrlabs/agent in Flower Hub now now allows follow-up prompts to retain context across runs in the same conversation. This app is a minimal agent that you can extend easily for your particular use case.
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Set federation icons (#8273)
Federations can now store an optional icon key, update or clear it. This helps identifying federations.
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Set up Endeavor with a Flower API key (#8324)
The Endeavor documentation now includes a dedicated Flower API key setup guide for the macOS CLI and desktop app, with clearer navigation across the Codex and OpenCode guides. Read more in the Endeavor 1.0 documentation.
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Improve security in Docker containers (#8348, #8355)
Alpine-based Flower container images now use Alpine 3.23, upgrade installed packages in their final build stage, and omit pip and ensurepip from the runtime image. New releases no longer build Alpine 3.22 variants; historical release tags remain available. Ubuntu images continue to include pip.
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General improvements (#8037, #8269, #8276, #8277, #8278, #8281, #8286, #8289, #8312, #8326, #8327, #8332, #8334, #8335, #8336, #8338, #8340, #8342, #8347, #8354)
As always, many parts of the Flower framework and quality infrastructure were improved and updated.
Incompatible changes
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Require cryptography 50 on all platforms (#8344)
Flower 1.40.0 requires cryptography 50.x on every platform. Systems that cannot install it cannot upgrade to this Flower version. This may affect 32-bit Windows and Intel-based macOS, for which cryptography 50 no longer provides prebuilt wheels.