Grav 2.0 Released!

Today, Grav 2.0 is stable. I'm thrilled to finally write those words.

This is the biggest release in the project's history, and it's been a long road to get here. The first 1.8 beta went out on October 23rd, 2024. Thirty betas later we made the call to stop patching and start rethinking, renamed the whole thing to 2.0 this past April, then ran it through four more betas and ten release candidates. Grav itself has been around since 2014, so this release has been a decade in the making and the better part of two years in active development. Today it ships.

If you want the full backstory on how we got here, the State of Grav post tells it honestly, including why 1.8 never made it to stable.

The Long Road

The short version: Grav 1.7 has been a workhorse for years, but its library stack tops out at PHP 8.3. To keep moving we had to modernize everything underneath, and that's what 1.8 was meant to do. The libraries upgraded fine. The problem was the upgrade itself. The old "safe upgrade" tried to mutate a running site in place, and real-world installs kept finding edge cases we couldn't reliably solve.

So we stopped fighting it. Instead of patching the upgrade, we changed the approach entirely, and the scope of everything else we'd added (a new API, a new admin, AI integration, a fully modernized stack) had grown well past anything a point release should carry. Calling it 2.0 was just being honest about what it is. I wrote about that decision in Introducing Grav 2.0.

What's New

The fundamentals you picked Grav for haven't moved. It's still file-based, still no database required, still no build step, and your edits still go live the moment you save. Everything around those fundamentals just got a decade more modern.

Here are the headlines:

A modernized stack

Grav 2.0 runs on PHP 8.3 through 8.5+, with the latest Symfony and Twig and a refreshed library stack top to bottom. This is the foundation that lets us keep shipping security and performance updates for years to come.

A first-party API

There's now a real REST API at the heart of Grav, and it's part of the core package. It's authenticated, permission-checked, and it can manage every part of a site: pages, media, config, users, plugins, and system tasks. It powers the new admin, it powers the AI integration, and it makes proper headless and decoupled setups a first-class option. The full story is in The Grav API.

A brand new admin

Admin Next is a complete rebuild of the admin, and it's the default in 2.0. It's a fast, modern app driven entirely by the API, with light and dark modes, three ways to view your pages (including Mac Finder style columns), a customizable dashboard, real-time collaborative editing, and proper multilingual support with right-to-left layouts out of the box. Take the tour in Admin Next.

Native AI

This is the one I'm most excited about. Grav 2.0 ships a first-party MCP server, so an AI agent can do anything you can do in the admin, through the exact same API, with the exact same permissions. No bolted-on chatbot, no separate AI permission system, no shortcuts. I've been running my own sites this way for months. See Grav + AI.

Better content tooling

Markdown gets a real upgrade with GitHub Flavored Markdown on by default (task lists, highlights, autolinks and more), along with optional table enhancements and a faster renderer. Details in Markdown Enhancements. Twig in page content is now sandboxed and off by default, which closes a real security gap. That's covered in Twig in Content and the New Security Sandbox.

This is a Migration, Not an Upgrade

I need to be direct about this part, because it's the single biggest change in how you move to 2.0.

Here's how it works. You install the Migrate to Grav 2.0 plugin on your existing 1.7 or 1.8 site. It stages a fresh Grav 2.0 install in a subfolder right next to your live site, runs the migration in a clean PHP process with none of your old code loaded, and brings your content, accounts, and compatible plugins across. Your live site keeps running the entire time, untouched.

You then test the staged 2.0 site against your real content for as long as you like. When you're happy, you promote it (we back up your old install first). If you're not, you reset, and your original site is exactly as it was. No commit point until you choose one.

The full walkthrough, step by step, is in Migrating to Grav 2.0. Please read it before you start.

A Fresh getgrav.org

You're reading this on a brand new site. We rebuilt getgrav.org on a new dark theme called Event Horizon (the animated black-hole on the homepage is exactly the kind of thing the name was asking for), and the whole thing runs on Grav 2.0 itself, managed through Admin Next, with content flowing through the API. If we're going to tell you 2.0 is ready for real, busy, public sites, the least we can do is run our own on it. There's a quick tour in The New getgrav.org.

Our Forum, Now Native to Grav

Here's something I'm genuinely pleased about. We've moved our community forum off Discourse and onto getgrav.org/forum, running on a native, database-backed Grav forum built on the new 2.0 API.

This isn't an embed or an iframe. It's a real forum running as a Grav plugin: members, topics, reactions, polls, private messages, full-text search, moderation tools, and live updates, all server-rendered and wearing the same theme as the rest of the site. We brought the whole Discourse community across with a proper importer, members with working passwords and all their history intact. It even backs the comments on blog posts, so one account and one moderation queue covers everything.

We've changed where the Grav community lives a few times over the years, from Gitter to Slack to Discord. This is the first time that home is something we built ourselves, on Grav. Discord is still there for real-time chat at chat.getgrav.org, but the forum is the place for longer discussions that stick around and stay searchable.

For Developers

Good news: most plugins work on 2.0 as-is. The plugin architecture, the event system, and blueprints are all unchanged. The main things to know are the new compatibility flags (a one-line blueprint addition so GPM and the migration tool know what you've tested), and the new ways to extend the API and Admin Next if your plugin has its own admin UI.

Start with Grav 2.0 for Plugin Developers and Compatibility Flags. From there the developer series covers API integration and building custom fields, pages, panels, and menu bar items for Admin Next. There are also Claude Code skills to help you do it.

Getting Started

• New to Grav? Grab 2.0 from the downloads page and follow the Learn site to get going.
• Coming from 1.7 or 1.8? Read Migrating to Grav 2.0, install the Migrate plugin on your current site, and take it at your own pace.
• Building plugins or themes? The Learn site has the full API and Admin Next reference.

Thank You

A release like this doesn't happen alone. Thank you to everyone who ran the betas and release candidates on real sites, filed issues, and told us what was broken. Thank you to the contributors, the plugin and theme developers carrying the ecosystem forward, our Trilby Media clients, and the sponsors who make the time for this possible. Grav has always been as much yours as ours, and the next chapter is better with you in it.

If you hit a snag migrating or just want to say hello, the fastest place to get help is our Discord at chat.getgrav.org, or come start a thread on the new forum. The team and a horde of helpful community members are there.

Now go build something.

Andy