Editing Wiki.tetrain.com Upgrade Plan (section)

== 3. Chosen approach ==

* '''Target OS: Rocky Linux 9''' (chosen over 10 — more production-proven at this point).
* '''Target MediaWiki: 1.43 LTS''' (supported through Dec 2027; requires PHP 8.1+, MariaDB 10.1+/MySQL 5.5.8+). Chosen over the newer 1.46 stable for production stability.
* '''Migration mechanism: disposable Docker containers, one per LTS hop''', since the hop chain needs several different PHP versions that can't sanely coexist natively on one Rocky 9 box. Official MediaWiki Docker Hub images only retain current-era tags, so each hop is built from the official <code><nowiki>php</nowiki></code> image (which does keep full historical tags) plus the matching MediaWiki release tarball downloaded directly from releases.wikimedia.org.
* '''LTS hop chain''' (confirmed via mediawiki.org release history — [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Compatibility Compatibility], [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Upgrading Manual:Upgrading]): 1.18.4 (source) → '''1.23.16''' → '''1.27.7''' → '''1.31.16''' → '''1.35.13''' → '''1.39.11''' → '''1.43.2'''. One DB instance (MariaDB 10.11) persists across every hop; only the PHP runtime + MediaWiki codebase change per hop. <code><nowiki>update.php</nowiki></code> run at each stop reconciles the schema forward; extensions are deliberately *not* loaded during the hop chain (minimal <code><nowiki>LocalSettings.php</nowiki></code>, DB connection only) since the goal is walking the core schema, not extension data — extensions get reconciled once on the final 1.43 codebase.
* Final production runtime: native (not Docker) on Rocky 9, matching the rest of the fleet's operational pattern — PHP 8.1+, MariaDB 10.11 LTS, httpd or nginx+php-fpm, TLS via Let's Encrypt (client has already pointed DNS at the new box).