REVIEWED 230530

This document aims to be an all-encompassing guide for PHP upgrades and how they affect Drupal

Update Process

Pantheon

1. Update the pantheon.yml with a PHP version increment (php_version)

   

    

2. Create a branch with the changes and deploy it to a multidev

3. The multidev will not update the upstream by default as Pantheon does not read those changes by default on multidevs. The easiest way to force an update is to clone the multidev’s branch from the Pantheon repo and push a small update to the file directly to Pantheon.

4. Test, test, test

   1. Check critical paths and modules for compatibility

5. Once the compatibility is confirmed, merge to master and deploy

Acquia

Acquia PHP updates are most easily achieved using the UI:

https://docs.acquia.com/cloud-platform/manage/php/

Compatibility Checking

If you need to do compatibility checking amongst a large surface area, (such as all of your composer dependencies) you can simply use PHPCS with PHPCompatibility.

1. composer require squizlabs/php_codesniffer --dev

2. composer require phpcompatibility/php-compatibility --dev

3. Add the script to composer.json:

   1. "sniffer:php8.1": "phpcs -p ./web/ --ignore=*/node_modules/*,**.js,**.css --standard=vendor/phpcompatibility/php-compatibility/PHPCompatibility --runtime-set testVersion 8.1"

4. Which can be then invoked from the command line: composer sniffer:php8.1

Facts (as of May 30, 2023)

• Drupal 7 supports PHP 8.2 as of version 7.94

• Drupal 10.0.0 is the first modern version of Drupal with PHP 8.2 support

• PHP 8.1 has been supported since 9.3.0

• PHP 8.0 since 9.1.0

• Drupal requires some PHP extensions, this should be called out by Composer, but you can see the details in the docs.

• There are some configuration defaults that change if you are running PHP locally: https://www.drupal.org/docs/system-requirements/php-requirements#configuration

• Lando’s minimum support for PHP 8 is 3.5.3, so local versions should be updated by each developer: https://docs.lando.dev/getting-started/updating.html

• To update the PHP version on Lando on a Pantheon recipe, change the pantheon.yml file. Changing the Lando config will have no effect.

• DDEV supports PHP 8 by changing the configuration in the .ddev/config.yml file

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