PHP 8.x Upgrade Considerations
reviewed 230530
This document aims to be an all-encompassing guide for PHP upgrades and how they affect Drupal
Update Process
Pantheon
Update the
pantheon.yml
with a PHP version increment (php_version
)Â
Create a branch with the changes and deploy it to a multidev
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.
Test, test, test
Check critical paths and modules for compatibility
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.
composer require squizlabs/php_codesniffer --dev
composer require phpcompatibility/php-compatibility --dev
Add the script to composer.json:
"sniffer:php8.1": "phpcs -p ./web/ --ignore=*/node_modules/*,**.js,**.css --standard=vendor/phpcompatibility/php-compatibility/PHPCompatibility --runtime-set testVersion 8.1"
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
Review History
Who | When | Status |
---|---|---|
 |  |  |
Bob | 20230530 | Updated, now Current |