Proposal: Remove CHT 3.x Hosting documentation

Product Documentation
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Intro

Hi there! I’m proposing we remove CHT 3.x hosting documentation.

Background

The last major revision of CHT (3.17.0) was released in Oct 2022 and the last minor version (3.17.2) was released a year later in Oct 2023. While Medic has no way to know how many CHT 3.x versions are still running in production, we know that support ended for 3.x almost two full years ago.

With all this in mind, and given we have an archive of 3.x hosting docs already publish on the old docs site, I propose we simplify the docs site by deleting the hosting pages that are for 3.x. Folks may be wondering about the upcoming CHT 5.0 release and if we’ll need a new “CHT 5.x Hosting” section like the 4.x and 3.x that exist today. We will not! Hosting for CHT 4.x and 5.x is identical for both Docker and Kubernetes.

Changes

Here’s the changes I’m proposing:

  • Current 3.x Hosting Docs will be deleted
  • With newer SSO, couch2pg and CHT Sync hosting sections, move the current 4.x docs from /hosting/4.x to now be at /hosting/cht
  • Move all applicable CHT Hosting docs like costs, requirements and considerations, to be in the new /hosting/cht section.
  • Add redirects for all old locations so that robots like Google and humans like developers can easily find what they’re looking for

Examples of changes

What might this look like? If you’re more technically minded check out the “remove CHT 3.x hosting docs” branch which has a work in progress version that you can run locally with Hugo.

Or, check out the enumerated screenshot showing the current docs site on the left and the proposed on the right:

  1. 3.x documentation is removed
  2. All CHT hosting documentation, like “Considerations”, are under the correct and applicable “CHT Core” section
  3. All big and loud callouts about “this applies only to 3.x!!” and the like are removed
  4. Other hosting documentation, like the recently added “couch2pg”, is clearly in it’s own section, a peer of “CHT Core” and not awkwardly a peer of “4.x”

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Next steps

Community feedback is important! If there’s a bunch of concerns suggesting this move is a bad idea, I’ll either amend the changes per the feedback, or cancel them all together. However, if there’s no feedback, or just positive feedback, we’ll look to push these changes by the end of Jul 2025.

Please share your thoughts! Even a thumbs up or thumbs down would be helpful. Thank you!

1 Like
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Thank you @mrjones for reaching out to the community for feedback. We still have a few community supported deployments that are still using 3.x, most of these projects are planning to upgrade soon. I would propose that we remove the 3.x hosting documentation once they have upgraded to 4.x.

2 Likes
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@antony - thanks for the input! Would it be acceptable to still delete the content but add a note like this on the main hosting page?

Looking for 3.x Hosting information?
See the old docs site which has a complete copy of hosting 3.x information. Otherwise, the hosting section here includes information for CHT 4.x and later.

That way we can delete it, but folks who still want to read 3.x info can easily find it. At an even later date, we can decide to remove the note and the archive.

1 Like