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Apache Superset Repo Recap: March 2026
SUPERSET DEVELOPERS

Apache Superset Repo Recap: March 2026

Evan Rusackas
Evan Rusackas
4 min read
694 words

March was a broad platform month for Apache Superset, with 40 contributors merging 322 pull requests. Rather than one headline feature, March delivered a spread of meaningful additions: long-lived API key authentication, a big step forward for the MCP service's chart-creation tools, a revamped Matrixify control panel, and a wave of theming customization. Underneath it all was a steady stream of fixes and developer-experience improvements.

The community kept growing, too. Superset added 184 new members to the community Slack in March and welcomed 21 new contributors to the repo, 12 of whom merged their very first Superset PR. Welcome, all of you.

Highlights

API Key Authentication

Superset gained long-lived API key authentication (#37973). Users can create named keys with a configurable prefix (for example sst_) that work as Bearer tokens on any API endpoint, shown only once at creation and revocable at any time. This removes the JWT-refresh burden for CI/CD pipelines, scripts, and integrations that talk to Superset programmatically.

MCP Chart Creation Comes Online

March was the month Superset's MCP (Model Context Protocol) service learned to build charts. The generate_chart tool gained support for Big Number (#38403), pie, pivot table, and mixed time-series charts (#38375), Handlebars (#38402), and horizontal bar orientation (#38390), along with saved-metric support (#38955) and a compile check that validates a chart's query before returning it (#38408).

The service also got safer and leaner: RBAC permission checking on every tool (#38407), user roles and permission-aware instructions in responses (#38367), and a BM25 tool-search transform that trims the catalog sent on connect to save context (#38562).

A Revamped Matrixify Control Panel

Matrixify, Superset's matrix/pivot chart layout, got a cleaner control panel (#38519): a single on/off switch replaces the old pair of layout checkboxes, each axis gets its own mode selector, and a new "All dimensions" option auto-loads dimension values with explicit sort controls.

Theming Customization

Theming picked up real flexibility this month. Operators can now customize the Published/Draft dashboard-status and Physical/Virtual dataset-type labels with 16 new theme tokens for color, background, border, and icon (#38679); the theme editor modal gained automatic JSON formatting and a manual Format button (#38739); and ECharts theme overrides were generalized to array properties for finer control over chart styling (#37965).

Charts & Visualizations

  • An ECharts option editor for area, bar, line, smooth-line, and multi-time-series charts, with custom options parsed safely via an AST validator (#37868)
  • A "Color by primary axis" option that colors each bar individually when no dimensions are set (#37531)

Dashboards & Filters

  • Configurable match types (exact IN vs partial ILIKE: Contains / Starts with / Ends with) on the native Select filter (#38470)

Security & Auth

  • SAML login support in the frontend (#38606)
  • Granular export controls, Phase 1 (#38361)
  • Import/export of masked masked_encrypted_extra database fields, backend and frontend (#38077, #38078)
  • Hardened GitHub Actions by pinning workflow refs to SHAs (#38782)

Databases

  • A Google Cloud Datastore database engine spec (#37677)
  • Two-stage detection that prevents accidentally connecting to Redshift with the PostgreSQL driver (#38693)

Alerting & Reporting

  • An external-link warning flow for alerts/reports emails, routing external hrefs through a redirect confirmation (#35021)

Developer Experience

  • Upgraded the project to Node 22 (#37223)
  • Code-first frontend contributions for extensions (#38346) and an update command in the extensions CLI (#38651)
  • Faster frontend CI via zstd compression of the node-ci image (#38645) and running pre-commit only on changed files (#38155)

Internationalization

  • Updated Italian translations (#38821)

Dependency Updates

  • Dependabot kept packages current with 103 dependency-update PRs merged in March for security and stability.

Contributors

March's work came from 40 contributors:

alexandrusoare, amaannawab923, aminghadersohi, Antonio-RiveroMartnez, betodealmeida, cyber-jessie, dagecko, dpgaspar, endimonan, EnxDev, FrancescoCastaldi, gabotorresruiz, geido, hainenber, hughhhh, ironponcho, joaopedroab, justinpark, kgabryje, Krishnachaitanyakc, LevisNgigi, luizotavio32, madhushreeag, Mayankaggarwal8055, mcdogg17, michael-s-molina, msyavuz, rebenitez1802, richardfogaca, rusackas, sadpandajoe, sha174n, splasky, torzsmokus, veeceey, villebro, Vitor-Avila, yousoph, YuriyKrasilnikov, zhaorui2022

First-Time Contributors

A warm welcome to March's 12 first-time contributors: cyber-jessie, dagecko, endimonan, FrancescoCastaldi, ironponcho, joaopedroab, Krishnachaitanyakc, Mayankaggarwal8055, splasky, torzsmokus, veeceey, YuriyKrasilnikov

Get Involved

Want to be part of next month's recap? There's a place for everyone:

See you next month.

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