Discourse on AWS 1.3.0: Discourse v2026.4.0 and a New Integration Test Suite

May 2, 2026

Our AWS Marketplace Discourse pattern now ships Discourse v2026.4.0, picking up the April monthly release with OIDC group sync, embedded full-app comments, bulk topic pinning, and dozens of admin tooling improvements. We also added a pytest + Playwright integration test suite to the pattern.

We just published version 1.3.0 of the Discourse on AWS by FOSSonCloud pattern to AWS Marketplace. The headline is a Discourse upgrade from v2026.3.0 to v2026.4.0 — the April 2026 monthly release — plus a new pattern-level integration test suite.

What’s in this release

Discourse v2026.4.0 (up from v2026.3.0)

Upstream’s April monthly release lands 499 changes across 50 features, 106 fixes, 13 performance improvements, and 82 UX enhancements. Highlights:

  • OpenID Connect group sync — automatically synchronize group memberships from your OIDC provider, removing a chunk of manual admin work
  • Embedded full-app mode — Discourse can now run as a complete comment system inside an iframe on an external site, with replies and interactions handled in place
  • Topic Voting plugin enhancements — four new badges celebrating members whose topics receive votes, plus voting access improvements, notification prompts, and Hot sorting
  • Reactions transparency — view all likes and reactions on a given post
  • Solved topic notifications — members tracking or watching a topic now get notified when it’s marked solved

Admin and moderator tooling

  • Bulk topic pinning — pin or un-pin topics in bulk via topic actions
  • Flexible category approvals — topic and reply approval requirements can now be set with granular group-level exceptions
  • Dedicated tag editing page — streamlines managing tag names, descriptions, synonyms, and translations
  • Bookmark management from the topic footer — view, jump to, edit, or delete every bookmark in a topic from one menu
  • Data Explorer charts — expanded charting for query visualization

No security advisories or breaking changes are called out in the v2026.4.0 changelog.

Pattern-level modernization (not from upstream)

  • discourse_docker pin bumped to commit e295aff — same discourse/base:2.0.20260209-1300 runtime image, but picks up the upstream “clear stuck web upgrade flags after a full rebuild” fix
  • OE devenv bumped to 2.8.4 — restores pytest and playwright which were missing from the 2.8.3 container
  • Versioned AMI parameter bumped to AsgAmiIdv130
  • New integration test suite under test/integration/ — health checks, infrastructure assertions, and UI smoke tests via pytest + Playwright, running alongside the existing taskcat coverage

Fresh deployments

Just subscribe on AWS Marketplace and launch. You’ll need a Route 53 hosted zone and an ACM certificate in advance — everything else the template provisions, including the VPC, Aurora cluster, Redis, EFS, S3 uploads bucket, SES domain identity, and ALB.

What’s next

The new integration test suite gives us faster, more targeted feedback than full taskcat runs, so we expect to ship Discourse upgrades more frequently as upstream cuts monthly releases. If you hit anything in 1.3.0, file an issue on GitHub.

— FOSSonCloud