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Renku Release | September 2026 • Renku Apps, Project Storage and more connectors

· 5 min read
Elisabet Capon
Elisabet Capon
Renku Community Manager
Rok Roškar
Rok Roškar
Renku Team Lead
Laura Kinkead
Laura Kinkead
Renku Product Manager

Renku has always made it easy to build your project and share it with a collaborator through a simple link. This release takes that a big step further. With Renku Apps, you can now publish your work as a live, always-ready app that opens the instant someone clicks. Starting with this release, we offer Renku project storage: any project can get its own fast, persistent home for its data.

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🚀 Publish your project as an App​

Renku has always been a great place to build a dashboard, a demo or an interactive report. Sharing one meant asking your collaborator to wait for a session to spin up first. While that's fine for a working session, it's a poor experience for something you want people to just open and use.

With Apps, you can now publish your project as a live app that's ready the moment someone opens the link. Dashboards built with Streamlit or Shiny, interactive demos, and model endpoints you can send requests to, all served directly from your project.

You just need to create an app launcher pointing at the git repository that contains your app. Renku deploys it behind a stable URL based on your project and launcher names. Anyone with the link can use it, without waiting for the session to start and no setup on their end. When traffic picks up, your app scales to meet demand; when no one's using it, it scales back down to zero, so we avoid idle compute. As apps run from the same project as everything else, they can pull in your data through data connectors, just like your sessions do.

For this first release, apps run on public projects. If you make a project with a live app private, the app is switched off.

Learn more about Renku Apps in our documentation. Check our demo project on energy demand of the buildings.

💾 Give your project its own persistent storage​

Until now, Renku connected your compute to your storage, but didn't offer storage of its own. In those cases where fast data access is required, the advice was to copy data into the session workspace by hand and re-copy it every time the session shut down. It worked, but it was a hassle, and it wasn't obvious.

Project storage resolves that gap and gives you a place to put your data without needing to create a data connector to an external data source. Plus, since this storage lives inside RenkuLab itself, it's fast, so there's no need to copy data into the session workspace for best performance.

To make sure we get this feature right, we are rolling out this feature with limited access as a start. If you'd like to use project storage, simply get in touch at hello@renku.io and let us know the Renku project where you'd like to add storage. After activating Project storage, anyone in the project will be able to attach the storage from the Data section. Once created, it's available in every session and job launched from that project, and it's shared automatically with everyone working on the project. Multiple sessions can read and write to it at the same time, and your data stays put when a session pauses, resumes or shuts down. Access follows your existing project roles: owners and editors can read and write, viewers get read-only access and anonymous users have no access even on a public project.

The result is data that's fast, persistent, and right next to your compute, without anyone having to think about where it lives.

🌟 Expanding Data Repository Integrations: Connectors for PSI's SciCat and Publishing to WSL's EnviDat​

We are continuously working to make avaialble more data sources in, more destinations out, and fewer things to go wrong along the way.

  • Import from PSI SciCat. You can now import datasets directly from the PSI SciCat data catalog, alongside the existing import sources.
  • Export to EnviDat. Data can now be exported from Renku to the EnviDat platform.

🔧 Under the Hood: Fixes & Performance​

This release also includes a wide range of smaller fixes and improvements across the platform such as persisted logs and compute resources within groups. As usual, the full list lives in our GitHub Releases page.

🐸 Ready to get started? Hop into renkulab.io and get a jumpstart with our documentation.

💬 We love to hear your feedback! Share questions, ideas, and suggestions with us on our forum.

📺 Prefer a walkthrough? Watch the Renku feature preview on YouTube.

🚀 Curious about what's coming next? Check out our roadmap to see what new features we're working on.