n98-magerun: Officially Sunsetting the Magento 1 CLI Tool

Published by Christian Münch on July 4, 2026

After many years, I’m drawing a line: development of n98-magerun — the CLI tool for Magento 1 — is officially discontinued. This isn’t triggered by any technical problem, but by a simple fact: Magento 1 itself reached end-of-life on June 30, 2020, and there’s no official support for it anymore.

Why now?

The reasoning is pragmatic. At valantic, our day-to-day work doesn’t involve Magento 1 projects, nor the OpenMage fork that continues the platform’s development. And for me, a simple principle applies: I can only seriously maintain or develop a tool if I’m also operationally working with the underlying software. Once that’s no longer the case, continued maintenance becomes a facade — pretending to be close to something you’ve actually moved on from.

Rather than keeping n98-magerun on life support, I’d rather make a clean cut.

What this means

• There will be no more releases, features, or bug fixes from me for n98-magerun.
• The repository remains available as a reference and starting point.
• Anyone still running n98-magerun in production shouldn’t count on further official maintenance.

The good news: open source lives on

What I’m glad about: the community has already picked up the torch. Forks that continue development are explicitly welcome — that’s open source at its core. A tool that enough people find useful doesn’t disappear just because a single maintainer steps back. It moves on, into other hands, under a different flag.

So if you’re maintaining or planning a fork: I support that, even though I’m no longer actively contributing myself.

What about n98-magerun2?

For anyone still on Magento 1 considering the move: development of n98-magerun2, the counterpart for Magento 2 and Adobe Commerce, continues completely unaffected — actively, with regular releases.

Thanks to everyone who used n98-magerun over the years, gave feedback, and contributed. It was a good run.