OpenVox 9.0 beta release 🍾 🎉 Edit

Published on Jul 15, 2026 by Sharpie.

Happy Wednesday Everyone!

In celebration of VoxConf and The Foreman Birthday, the release team is pleased to announce something special this week:

We have just shipped 9.0.0~beta1 releases of the openvox-agent, openvox-server, and openvoxdb packages.

This is the first 9.0 pre-release that contains both the agent and the server packages and they have been shipped as a set to new openvox9 repositories. To configure these repositories, install the openvox9-release packages from:

Packages for macOS can be found at:

https://downloads.voxpupuli.org/mac/openvox9/

Updates to homebrew-openvox will show up later in the week.

It wouldn’t be a beta release without something going wrong, and today it was our Windows signing pipeline. For those adventurous souls who are fine with unsigned packages, the Windows build can be found on OSUOSL:

https://s3.osuosl.org/openvox-artifacts/openvox-agent/9.0.0~beta1/openvox-agent-9.0.0~beta1-x64.msi

That build will be published to https://voxpupuli.org once the Windows signer is sorted out.

Headline component changes in these releases, compared to OpenVox 8:

  • openvox-agent now uses Ruby 4.0, which is an upgrade from Ruby 3.2.
  • openvox-server and openvoxdb are configured to run on Java 25, with the exception of EL 8 which uses Java 21. This is an upgrade from Java 17.
  • openvox-server now uses JRuby 10.0, which is compatible with Ruby 3.4. This is an upgrade from JRuby 9.4, which was compatible with Ruby 3.1.
  • openvoxdb is now tested against PostgreSQL 17 and 18. This is an upgrade from PostgreSQL 14.

Please see the release notes for numerous other changes, including bugfixes and breaking changes:

This is a BETA release, so we don’t recommend upgrading production systems at this time. For those who try upgrading test systems to use these releases, there are a couple of caveats to be aware of:

  • Do a full upgrade via apt, dnf, or zypper in order to re-solve dependencies. This should bring in the new Java 25 or Java 21 packages. After upgrade, check update-alternatives --display java to ensure /usr/bin/java points at version 21 or newer. If the new packages try to run under Java 17, the service will crash early with Execution error (ClassNotFoundException) referencing java.util.SequencedCollection.
  • If you have previously installed either of our 9.0.0.alpha1 or 9.0.0.alpha2 releases, then you will need to downgrade to the beta release. E.g. dnf downgrade openvox-agent 9.0.0~beta1. The tilde, ~, in the beta release version makes it sort older than a full version number and should help later when upgrading pre-releases to the final 9.0.0 version.

Finally, thanks to everyone in the community who has submitted pull request, filed bugs, tried out pre-releases, and otherwise contributed to making these builds happen. Special shout-outs to Tim Meusel and Haroon Rafique for working on all aspects of these builds, Steven Pritchard for keeping track of breaking changes, and Josh Partlow for tons of work on the acceptances tests. Shout out to Austin Blatt for getting us onto Jetty 12, and Nick Burgan for building out the release infrastructure to make this happen. Special thanks to Jerald Sheets for testing early builds and uncovering issues 🦊

If you have questions about, or encounter issues with these releases, reach out in #openvox on Slack or #voxpupuli-openvox on IRC. See https://voxpupuli.org/connect/ for details.