PHP 7.4 has served us well over the past years. But now it's time to move on–to PHP 8.

No longer supported by the developers, PHP 7.4 will no longer receive any updates at all from November 28th on. As the PHP website states:

Each release branch of PHP is fully supported for two years from its initial stable release. […]

After this two year period of active support, each branch is then supported for an additional year for critical security issues only. […]

Once the three years of support are completed, the branch reaches its end of life and is no longer supported.

By now PHP 7.4 has (almost) reached it's end-of-life. Thus it's time to drop support for those versions in Beach.

Skip PHP 8.0

Switching to PHP 8.0 would be a waste of resources – active support for 8.0 will end on November 26th. So you should really go for PHP 8.1, unless some needed libraries block that.

Upgrade to PHP 8.1

Flow and Neos by now support PHP 8.1 very well.

If you use no or only a few 3rd party packages in your project, chances are you can upgrade easily. Running composer update with the desired PHP version should suffice.

If you are wondering whether the Flow or Neos version used in your project supports PHP 8, the compatibility matrix in the Neos documentation should clear things up.

What happens in Beach

The option to use 7.4 for new instances will be removed from the PHP version selector in a timely manner. Existing instance configured for those version will keep using it when removed and can be deployed as usual.

Quite many of the instances hosted at our Beach are still using PHP 7.4, the maintainers have been contacted directly.

As soon as all instances switched away from that version, we will disable support for deploying intances based on it. In a next step we will drop it from the build chain of our PHP container images.

If you need help

If you need help with updating, be it just the PHP version or more substantial parts of your project, don't hesitate to get in touch with us. We are here to help!