This document aims to be an all-encompassing guide for the upcoming PHP upgrades and how the 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, 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 like so: composer sniffer:php8.1

Facts as of June 30th 2022

• Drupal’s last version which supports PHP 8.0 is Drupal 7.79

• PHP 8.1 is only Supported by Drupal 9 & 10

  • There does seem to be an effort to add Drupal 7.X to higher versions of PHP: https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/3224299

• Drupal 10 will drop support for PHP 7

• Drupal 9.4 will drop support for PHP 7.3

• Should we ever need to run PHP locally, there are a few PHP extensions that Drupal now depends on: https://www.drupal.org/docs/system-requirements/php-requirements#extensions

• 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

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