Flarum 1.8.20 - Maintenance Release
Flarum 1.8.20 is a small maintenance release for the 1.8 line. It fixes two bugs and adds a static-analysis rule for extension developers. This is not a security release — there is no vulnerability being patched here — but we recommend keeping up to date.
The 1.8 line is in critical fixes only maintenance (supported until 2026-12-31); the changes below met that bar or are otherwise low-risk tooling.
Who should upgrade
- Flarum 1.x: anyone on 1.8.x can upgrade. It is especially worth doing if you run a multilingual forum whose default language is not English (see the first fix below), or if your host disables the
exec function (common on some shared hosting).
- Flarum 2.x: unaffected — these fixes are already present on the 2.x line.
There is no urgency for forums that are not hitting these specific issues, but the upgrade is safe and recommended.
What's changed
Fixed
Fallback locale showing raw => … translation references. On a multilingual forum whose default locale is not English, the English (en) fallback catalogue could be compiled with unresolved => core.… reference strings baked into the locale asset — leaving parts of the admin UI showing literal => core.admin.… text until the cache was cleared, which the next admin action could then re-trigger. The catalogue is now parsed correctly regardless of the order locales are loaded in. flarum/framework5024
flarum info / System Info page erroring where exec is disabled. On hosts that list exec in PHP's disable_functions (common on shared hosting), the info command fatally errored, and the admin System Info page showed only Error loading info: undefined. The affected best-effort fields now degrade gracefully to "unable to detect" instead of taking down the whole report — restoring the diagnostic page that admins rely on when gathering information for support. flarum/framework5060
Added
- PHPStan rule for extension developers. A new static-analysis rule catches misaligned extender callback signatures (for example, an
ApiSerializer attributes callback with the wrong parameter order) that can silently leak raw model data into API responses. Extension authors running PHPStan will now be warned about this class of mistake at analysis time. flarum/framework5050
How to upgrade
composer update flarum/core --with-all-dependencies
php flarum migrate
php flarum cache:clear
Then confirm your version:
php flarum info
You should see Flarum core 1.8.20.
Looking ahead: upgrade to 2.0
The 1.8 line is in minimal maintenance — it receives critical fixes only, through 2026-12-31 — and will not gain new features or fixes for anything other than critical problems. If you can, we recommend planning an upgrade to Flarum 2.0, which is where active development, new features, and full support now happen. 1.8.20 keeps existing 1.x forums healthy in the meantime; it is not a reason to stay on 1.x.
See the upgrade guide to get started, and note that upgrading is best done via the CLI rather than the in-app extension manager.
Thanks
Thanks to the contributors who reported and fixed these issues.
Questions about upgrading? Ask in theSupport tag.
