Registry Relay retirement decision

Registry Stack retired Registry Relay on 2026-10-03. Version 0.38.0 is the last numbered release that includes the relay runtime, relayctl, and the Relay client namespaces. Version 0.39.0 is the first numbered release without them.

Why Relay was retired

Relay compiled a reviewed contract into protected, read-only HTTP operations over SQLite data. It also carried Relay-specific classification, disclosure, semantic, statistical, JSON-FG, and client contracts, including cacheable public snapshots.

Maintaining those contracts as a separate runtime imposed more implementation, deployment, and operational work than the supported pilots justified. Registry Stack deliberately removed that capability instead of moving Relay internals into another product. No replacement SDMX or JSON-FG service is introduced by this decision.

What remains

Choose a retained capability according to the result you need:

• Use Base Registry Engine for governed records and record APIs owned by a PostgreSQL-backed registry.
• Use Evidence Gateway for signed, minimum-disclosure assertions obtained from fixed HTTP or SQLite sources.
• Use Registry Manifest to generate portable metadata and host its output as static files.

These capabilities do not reproduce Relay’s contract, routes, policy model, or wire formats. There is no automatic migration from a Relay project. An operator must choose a retained design for each consumer and source.

Registry Discovery continues to publish the existing v1alpha1 profile resources for historical compatibility, but current tools accept only Evidence service descriptions and selections. Before upgrading, remove Relay origins from a mixed index and rebuild and repackage the index.

Support boundary

Registry Stack uses a roll-forward security model: security fixes ship in the latest release, and Registry Stack does not promise backports to an earlier minor. From 0.39.0 the latest release contains no Relay, so Relay receives no security fixes once 0.39.0 is released. A deployment that stays pinned to 0.38.0 keeps a Relay runtime with no promised remedy for a vulnerability found later. Treat the pin as a bounded migration state, not a supported configuration.

Use the v0.38.0 documentation and artifacts only when maintaining a pinned Relay deployment during migration. They remain available in two places:

• The v0.38.0 GitHub release keeps the last relay and relayctl binaries, the Relay installer, and the documentation archive registry-docs-v0.38.0.tar.gz as release assets.
• The 0.38.0 documentation, including its Relay pages, is served at docs.registrystack.org/v/0.38.0/ while 0.38.0 is one of the three newest release archives. After later releases move it out of that window, the documentation remains available as that release asset.

Published documentation archives and release artifacts remain unchanged. Current source and numbered releases beginning with 0.39.0 do not contain Relay binaries, clients, installers, images, or authoring tools. The latest published 0.38.0 release remains unchanged.