v0.7.8.

The one that un-breaks hardened hosts: a class of silent failures where the panel's own hardening (read-only /root) starved the tools it spawns — buildx and PM2 — is found, fixed, and now guarded by an installer preflight so it can never ship quietly again. Also: the .ninedeploy manifest's three "declared but ignored" sections now actually work.

Added

• Manifest sections are wired: previews, notifications and volume.backups. A .ninedeploy file now configures PR preview settings, per-service notification subscriptions and the volume-backup schedule at deploy time instead of being read and dropped with a warning. notifications channel names resolve to per-service rules whose delivery is additive to each channel's own global event filter (rules can only add one service's events to a channel, never take anything away); volume.backups drives a manifest-owned kind: backup scheduled job and refuses invalid cron expressions loudly; preview hostname patterns stay constrained at routing time as before. Only static, watch and network remain panel-side.
• Clone failures now explain themselves. Git says "repository not found" for both a missing repo and a private one read anonymously — the deploy log now adds the fix that applies to the service's actual setup (no credential attached / deploy-key registration / token validity).
• The installer runs a deploy preflight. After the health gate, install.sh performs a five-second scratch docker build with the same DOCKER_CONFIG the unit exports, so a broken build toolchain is caught during the install — with output and the known-cause hint — instead of by the operator's first push.

Fixed

• docker build failed on every hardened install ("failed to update builder last activity time: open /root/.docker/buildx/activity/…: read-only file system"). v0.7.3's ProtectHome=read-only makes /root read-only for the root-run panel, and modern buildx insists on writing builder-activity files under $DOCKER_CONFIG on every build. The unit now exports DOCKER_CONFIG (and PM2_HOME, for the same class of failure in the PM2 process-list dump) pointing at writable paths under the data directory, the panel's env allowlist inherits them, and both directories are created at boot. Docker-mode installs were never affected.
• PM2 deployments could not persist their process list on hardened installs for the same reason — dump.pm2 was written to the read-only /root/.pm2. The dump now lives under the data directory, and the boot-resurrect unit reads the same path.