Deprecating .hbs file extension in themes and plugins

[david (David Taylor)]

In the latest version of Discourse, using .hbs files in themes and plugins is deprecated. Support for this file format will be removed after the next ESR release.

Handlebars templates should be replaced with the more modern .gjs format, which provides a much better development experience, and will enable large performance improvements in future versions of Discourse.

Updates to your theme or plugin can be automated by using these instructions:

Automatically updating themes and plugins to .gjs file format

In the latest version of Discourse’s standard linting config, we’ve enabled the require-strict-mode ember-template-lint rule. This will raise a linting error for any .hbs files. To resolve the warnings, you should convert all your component, route, and connector templates to .gjs files. To make this easy, we’ve built the discourse-gjs-codemod, which builds on top of Ember’s @embroider/template-tag-codemod. To use the codemod, first ensure that your linting dependencies are up-to-date by copyin…

[RGJ (Richard - Communiteq)]

@david

after the next ESR release

Do I understand correctly that 2026.7 will still support hbs files and 2027.1 will be the first ESR release that doesn’t?

[david (David Taylor)]

Yes, exactly.

It’s most likely that we will drop support in 2026.8.0-latest. But it’s possible it could be later, depending on real-world data and community feedback.