Textpattern project server repave - winter 2025/2026

gaekwad · Yesterday 13:37:04

Hi, everyone. I’m the Textpattern project web server grease monkey. I bring news of upcoming planned changes to our server setup.

Please note: this affects the Textpattern project web server presence, and not your own Textpattern instance. These are two separate things.

Our network of sites includes: the Textpattern ‘main’ .com site, this Textpattern user forum, the Textpattern user docs, the plugins site (in beta), the themes site (in pre-alpha), Textpattern design patterns, the legacy Textpattern RPC, TXP Mag, and a handful of redirect domains for legacy stuff.

It’s time to upgrade our server operating systems and libraries. It’s also a great time for me to deploy some of the enhancements / improvements I’ve made over the last few years of server builds so things run more smoothly. This will be a process that takes some time, because I want to do it right and work in the lessons learned from previous server repave projects.

Our hosting provider – DigitalOcean – have graciously renewed our hosting credit for a year, so I have a great opportunity to spend some of the dark nights of winter migrating our sites to fresh servers. As part of our arrangement with DigitalOcean, I have promised a written guide to how we use our sponsored server credit. That should be forthcoming in the spring after all our upgrades have taken place and the dust has settled.

The next post will be used to capture details on what’s happening, and when.

Please leave comments & questions as replies below. Thank you.

gaekwad · Yesterday 13:37:16

DigitalOcean Hosting

Operating system

Servers will be running Debian 13. This release has security support until mid-2028 and Long Term Support until mid-2030.

Current servers will be decommissioned and we will no longer be using Ubuntu.

Web Server

Websites will be served by Nginx with a web application firewall (vendor: to be advised).

Database

Our current database requirements extend to MySQL or compatible engine. Percona Server for MySQL will be used, and kept up-to-date from the vendor repository.

PHP

Our Textpattern-powered sites will be running Textpattern 4.9 at the time of the overhaul, and accordingly we’ll be using PHP 8.5 as the most performant & recent release.

Our forum software is reaching end of life as support for PHP 8.1 ends in December 2025. The main objective is to gauge how close we are to a drop-in replacement with one of the fluxBB forks. If that’s not viable, we will consider an in-place upgrade to make fluxBB compatible with PHP 8.5. If that’s not viable…well, then we’re going to find a new forum backend.

Third-party Hosting

Our docs site will move to third-party hosting (vendor: to be advised) that specialises in documentation. This will resolve some long-standing search issues, ~~my personal disdain of Jekyll & Ruby~~, and allow us to refresh some docs in the process.

Timescales

I’m waiting on a Percona release that has Debian 13 support from their own repository. I can compile from source, but it’s a multi-hour undertaking each upgrade and frankly their repo releases are absolutely fine for our needs.

PHP 8.5 lands at the end of November 2025. Textpattern 4.9 will come shortly after.

Target commencement: December 2025.

This post will be updated as changes are made.

Last edited by gaekwad (Yesterday 15:35:07)

mistersugar · Today 02:24:37

Thanks in advance for all that you will do in this. I’m glad DigitalOcean provides the hosting, but if there are ancillary costs that I (and others?) can help defray, please let me know. I would like to contribute my time and money to help Textpattern go another 20 years.

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#1 Yesterday 13:37:04