We Are In Release Candidate

Every minor release since 1.5 has shipped with a -beta tag. 1.7.0 is the first one tagged -rc instead — and that's not a small naming detail. It's the first real signal that Arkos is leaving its beta phase behind.

What changed

Over six minor releases and a little over a month of hard iteration, something quietly shifted: the issues coming in stopped being "this breaks" and started being "can this do X too." Bug reports on core behavior — routing, validation, auth, the ORM layer — have gotten rare. Most of what lands in the tracker now is feature requests, edge-case polish, or DX suggestions, not "the framework doesn't work as documented." That's the real marker of a framework settling down, more than any version number is.

ArkosGateway in this release is a good example of what that looks like in practice: a genuinely new subsystem, built on existing primitives (the auth system, ArkosPolicy, the validation resolver) instead of a parallel one-off. That's the pattern we want going forward — new capability that plugs into what's already solid, rather than expanding the surface area of things that still need to prove themselves.

What's next

Here's the version plan from here, so you can plan your own upgrades around it:

v1.8.0 — first stable release

The -beta/-rc qualifiers come off entirely. 1.8 is where we're committing to the current core APIs — routing, ArkosPolicy, RouteHook, the validation and error-handling layers, and the Gateway API introduced in 1.7 — as the stable v1 surface. Features keep landing after this, but the foundation stops moving under you.

v1.9.0 — continued feature work

More of the same trajectory: additions, not architecture changes. Anything that fits cleanly on top of the current design keeps shipping here.

v1.10.0 — first LTS release

This is the one to plan production upgrades around if you value stability over new features. 1.10 will be Arkos's first Long-Term Support release, with 3 years of bug-fix support after it ships. If you're running Arkos in production and want a version you can sit on without chasing every minor, 1.10 LTS is the target.

v2.0 — already in development

Some ideas don't fit into the v1 line no matter how we shape them — they need actual architecture changes, not additive config. Rather than force those into v1 and destabilize the thing we just spent a month and a half stabilizing, we've split the work: v1 keeps moving additively through 1.8, 1.9, and 1.10, while v2.0 development has already started in parallel for everything that needs a real breaking change to do properly.

We'll share more on what's actually going into 2.0 as that work solidifies — this post is about the shape of the roadmap, not a features list yet.

What this means for you

• On the bleeding edge? Keep tracking minors through 1.8 and 1.9 as usual.
• Running Arkos in production and want stability? 1.10 LTS is being built with you in mind — 3 years of bug fixes, no feature churn required.
• Curious what's structurally next? v2.0 is where the bigger architectural bets will land, and it's being developed openly alongside the v1 line, not as a surprise fork.

Thanks for filing the bug reports that got us here, and for the feature requests that tell us where to point v1.8 onward. Both are exactly the signal we needed.

Resources:

• Full documentation
• GitHub repository
• GitHub milestones — for tracking 1.8/1.9/1.10/2.0 as they take shape