WordPress.org FreeScout Instance

WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. Flagship events use individually managed FreeScout hosted on DigitalOcean instances, we need to bring this in-house for future customisations and migrationMigration Moving the code, database and media files for a website site from one server to another. Most typically done when changing hosting companies. of existing shared inboxes on our existing provider.

See Also: p93R5q-382-p2

A previous thread was raised, which we didn’t end up moving forward; but the landscape has changed, and now it’s more of a “We need to do this” not a “Can we?”, however we’ll be starting with Flagships and our own Inboxes first, with other events to be considered later on. https://make.wordpress.org/systems/2022/11/30/freescout-for-wordcamp-events/

Timeline is not urgent this-week, but this is something we need to complete in stages over the coming months as Flagships start/end their organisation. This can wait until after the DC migration.

What’s needed:
– VM with FreeScout
– MariaDB database (FreeScout is PDO based, likely will need to shim PDO -> HyperDB for failover/balancing/etc, or HyperDB config -> PDO, or HyperDB config -> Laravel DB Balancing config)
– Ability to customize settings (Unknown which at this time, can request changes via sysreq)
– Ability to install custom FreeScout modules (Unknown which at this time)
– Outbound emails signed for usual WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org//WordCamp.org domains

VM could either run nginx+PHP directly; or; Docker images (Either the recommended https://github.com/nfrastack/container-freescout or more likely w.org-specific image). FreeScout is currently PHP 8.3 primarily, and I imagine it’ll be out-of-sync with WordPress (as it’s Laravel based) PHP needs, so we’re probably better off going the containers route.

Let me know your thoughts and a path forward;

#prio2 #email

Installing Node.js 24 on the build server

Could Node.js 24 be installed on the wordpress.org build server? At the time of publishing, the latest version is 24.15.0 paired with npm version 11.12.1.

wordpress-develop and gutenberg are currently using version 20.x, which reached end-of-life (EOL) on April 30, 2026 (final release being published on March 24, 2026) and has a number of known security vulnerabilities that will not be patched. 24.x have Active or Maintenance LTS status through April 30, 2028.

A good amount of discussion has taken place already as there are a number of features in recent versions of Node.js/npm that the CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. & Security teams are hoping to take advantage of:

  • Full native support for ES modules, including interop between ES and CommonJS modules.
  • The ability to configure a min-release-age value within .npmrc for defensive supply-chain configurations (npm >= 11.0.0).
  • Running TypeScript files natively, with built-in type stripping, with no need for transpilation (experimental warning removed in 24.11.0).
  • Trusted publishing for npm packages to eliminate the need for long-lived npm tokens in favor of OpenID Connect  (npm >= 11.5.1).

Older Branches

Node.js 20.x is being used back through the 6.4 branch. Early testing shows those branches can be updated to 24.x without any dependency updates required with no resulting changes to the built WordPress files. More testing is needed, but ideally all of these branches would be upgraded in addition to trunk.

cc/ @aduth, @sirreal, @jsnajdr, @manzoorwanijk.

#nodejs, #prio2