Cachet 3.x Announcement

[jbrooksuk]

Discussed in #4342

^{Originally posted by jbrooksuk August 10, 2023}
Hey everyone,

It’s been a while 👋🏻

I want to start by saying that I owe so much to Cachet. My career at Laravel being just one of the many things I'm grateful for.

9 years ago, I released Cachet while working on another SaaS application. Cachet became my primary focus and it reached many heights. Fortune 50 companies were using it, it reached #1 on Hacker News, topped Product Hunt and casually sat in GitHub's trending projects for weeks like it was no big deal.

5 years ago, I sold Cachet. The buyers and I had big plans for the project. Unfortunately, those plans never came to life. I personally hold myself responsible for that. Within just a few weeks, my brother passed away and my first daughter was born. After that, I never felt right working on Cachet.

Fast forward 5 years and things have changed dramatically. I'm now in a much better place personally, I love my job at Laravel, I've launched a new product, Checkmango and I have a deep, burning desire to get my baby back.

A few months ago I mentioned in an issue that I was speaking with the owners to see if I could get Cachet back. It's taken us some time but we're now at a point where I have something to announce.

Cachet, is once again, mine 🎉

Immediately I have thoughts… Maybe I'm too late now? Maybe too much time has passed? Cachet may've blazed the way for open-source status page systems, but who's even using it anymore?

Honestly, I don’t think that’s a problem. I still get several emails a week about Cachet and the website + repository receive thousands of visitors a month. I firmly believe that we're in a good position to get Cachet going again.

So what's the plan, James?

Looking through the codebase is quite painful... I'm going to rebuild Cachet with Vue.js, Inertia, Laravel 10.x and Tailwind.
The current 2.4 branch of Cachet is old. It's easier to rebuild than it is to upgrade at this point. As much as I want 3.x to be 100% compatible, there are some things we need to keep in mind:

1. We'll only support PHP 8.1 and above. Anything below this is now EOL and not supported by Laravel 10.x (which we'll be using).
2. I may drop non-English translations. We can bring these back later if that happens.
3. I'm going to do my best to keep all existing installations working. Even if the upgrade takes a bit of work, I want all existing data to continue to live. This one is non-negotiable.

This isn't going to be an overnight job. It's going to take me a while and you'll be able to follow along too. Shortly, I'm going to be cleaning up the repository:

• Closing all issues (I'm going to make a note of any features / fixes I want to include in the new version).
• Closing all pull requests. They'll be incompatible anyway.
• Discussions will remain open.
• Deleting old branches.
• I'm going to be working in a new 3.x branch.

I’ve put real money into making this happen. This is happening.

Let’s make this super collaborative. Can you help? I’d really appreciate it if you could help me re-build Cachet. Here's what I'm looking for:

• People who are familiar with Tailwind and can help build a new frontend for both the status page and dashboard.
• People who are willing to test Cachet in the future.
• People who can write documentation. There will be a new cachethq/docs repository with VitePress installed and ready for the old docs to be migrated.
• Sponsorship. I'll be honest, this isn't a cheap endeavour for me. If you can sponsor the development of Cachet, I'd love you forever. You can sponsor me here on GitHub. I've applied for GitHub Organization Sponsors, but this will do for now.

I guess that's everything for now. Let me know what you think and importantly, whether you can help.

Thanks ❤️

[jbrooksuk]

Cross-posted from discussions to here for visibility.