Forgejo 17.0 Ships October 15 With Org Invitations and a Webhook Change That Needs Manual Migration

Forgejo 17.0, the self-hosted Git forge, was released on October 15, 2026, and anyone running it must migrate action-run webhooks by hand. The release announcement says the old webhooks are deprecated in favour of workflow run events, and that headers and the action key changed, so they cannot be converted automatically.

It is not a long-term-support release. Support ends on January 28, 2027, per the project's release schedule.

The change that needs a person

Action run webhooks are replaced by workflow run events. Completion notifications now arrive only after all jobs finish, which changes when a receiver is called as well as what it receives.

The upgrade notes tell administrators to inspect and migrate these webhooks manually after confirming their receivers can handle the new events. They also strongly recommend a full backup before upgrading, and a new documentation page covers backup and restore, including which secrets to keep.

A second breaking change touches documents. Absolute links in repository documents now resolve from the repository root instead of the instance root. Links in issue and pull request descriptions and comments still resolve from the instance root.

What else shipped

The release adds several things administrators and contributors will notice.

• Organization invitations, enabled with ADD_MEMBERS_BY_INVITATIONS = true in app.ini. Invitations go out by email and expire after 14 days.
• Autocompletion: typing # suggests issues and pull requests, and ! suggests pull requests only.
• A Donate button on repositories that carry a FUNDING.yml file, with no API for it yet.
• Bitbucket Data Center migration, including pull requests and review comments.

Forgejo Actions, the project's CI system, gets the most additions. New API endpoints rerun workflow runs and jobs, filter job logs, fetch a single step's logs and return NDJSON logs. Markdown job summaries from Forgejo Runner 13.2 or newer appear above the logs, and both $FORGEJO_STEP_SUMMARY and $GITHUB_STEP_SUMMARY are honoured.

Webhooks can also fire on workflow job status changes, with users choosing which statuses trigger them.

Which release to run

Forgejo ships quarterly, and the table below is the project's own schedule. Version 15.0 is the long-term-support line, which LWN reported on April 16, 2026 as supported through July 15, 2027.

Version	Released	End of life
15.0 (LTS)	April 16, 2026	July 15, 2027
16.0	July 16, 2026	October 29, 2026
17.0	October 15, 2026	January 28, 2027
18.0	January 14, 2027	April 29, 2027
19.0 (LTS)	April 15, 2027	July 13, 2028

Version 16.0 stops receiving support on October 29, 2026, which leaves 16.0 users 13 days to move. Anyone who would rather skip the webhook work can stay on 15.0, which the schedule keeps alive until July 2027, and wait for 19.0.

Upgrading means replacing the binary or the container image. The 17.0 container tag tracks patch releases automatically, and a test instance runs at v17.next.forgejo.org.

What the announcement leaves out

The announcement does not name individual contributors, and it gives no download or adoption figures. It also gives no count of how many existing installations use the deprecated webhook type, so the size of the migration burden is unknown.

The next date to watch is January 14, 2027, when 18.0 is due and 17.0 starts its final two weeks of support. That makes October 29 the first deadline for anyone still on 16.0.

For other release-note reading on open-source tooling, see our reports on the Rust 1.99.1 point release and on REA, the reverse-engineering tool with 270,097 GitHub stars.