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Releases
5.3.2

5.3.2 release notes

Released 2026-10-16

Highlights

5.3.2 is a patch release with two fixes for Nouveau, the CouchDB search service that drives user replication and server-side purging. It also fixes a 5.3.0 regression in how reports display their subject.

CouchDB 3.5.3

The CHT upgrades CouchDB to 3.5.3. This version fixes upstream bugs (apache/couchdb#6118) that caused Nouveau index rebuilds to fail after documents were purged from the database, for example with the archiving endpoint. Without that index, users can’t sync (#11456).

Smaller Nouveau queries

API and Sentinel request at most 20 000 results per page from the docs_by_replication_key Nouveau index, down from 200 000. CouchDB sends the limit to every shard, so the old value could exhaust the Nouveau heap during server-side purging and leave the index unusable until Nouveau restarted. Replication authorization pages through larger result sets instead of requesting them all at once (#11490).

Report subjects with an empty patient_id

When an offline user creates a person and then submits a report about them before syncing, the person has no shortcode yet, so the report saves an empty fields.patient_id. Since 5.3.0, the reports list and report detail showed these reports’ subject as plain text with no link to the contact, and showed the submitter’s lineage instead of the subject’s. With this fix, the CHT correctly falls back to fields.patient_uuid when fields.patient_id is empty, so these reports display their subject correctly (#11500). This matches the behavior of CHT versions prior to 5.3.0.

Known issues

Check the repository for the latest known issues.

Upgrade notes

Instances with a broken Nouveau index

All instances currently running 5.3.0 or 5.3.1 should upgrade to 5.3.2 first before upgrading to any later release.

If you are running a CHT version prior to 5.3.0 OR if offline users can successfully sync, your Nouveau indexes have not been affected by the #11456 bug and you can upgrade to 5.3.2 as usual.

If you are running CHT 5.3.0 or 5.3.1 AND users are unable to sync due to the #11456 bug additional steps are required to successfully upgrade. That issue affects the CHT instance’s ability to rebuild Nouveau indexes. Trying to upgrade an affected instance to a new CHT version will fail because the Nouveau indexes are not available and cannot be rebuilt. The issue with the Nouveau indexes must be resolved prior to upgrading.

The simplest way to fix the Nouveau indexes is to run the the repair script in your Couch container. (Note that the current version of the script only supports single-node Couch instances, but can be easily customized for a multi-node deployment.) See the documentation on the script for more details.

Breaking changes

None.

UI/UX changes

None.

And more…

Features

None.

Improvements

None.

Security fixes

None.

Performance improvements

None.

Bug fixes

  • #11456: Syncing issues with rebuilt Nouveau index after archiving
  • #11490: Server-side purging requests 200k hits per shard from docs_by_replication_key, exhausting Nouveau heap
  • #11500: Report subject is not linked and shows the submitter’s lineage when fields.patient_id is an empty string (regression in 5.3.0)

Technical improvements

None.

Contributors

Thanks to all who committed changes for this release!

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