Update: Please read this Lobby post, which contains an updated timeline & deadline for PHP 8.0 updates. PHP 8.1 is fully supported and available as part of our Software Management feature.
VIP is excited to announce that PHP 8.0 is now available on WordPress VIP environments. PHP 8.0 is a major update that provides a plethora of new features and under-the-hood improvements.
Some highlights of PHP 8.0 include named arguments, union types, attributes, constructor property promotion, match expression, nullsafe operator, JIT, improvements in the type system, error handling, and consistency.
Since this is a new major version, we strongly recommend that you test your application in a non-production environment running PHP 8.0. PHP 7.4 will be going end-of-life soon, so even if you are not taking advantage of these new features, now is the time to get a jump on the upgrade to PHP 8.0.
To test in a non-production environment, please open a ticket with our support team specifying which application(s) and the PHP version you’d like. In the near future, you’ll be able to control this via a setting in the VIP Dashboard and VIP-CLI. We strongly encourage you to test in a non-production environment before updating in production.
To help your migration and testing of PHP 8.0, we recommend following these steps:
1. Update to our newly released version of VIP-CLI (2.9.5). You can pick the desired PHP version via `create` or `update` command to test new PHP versions locally.
2. Update a non-production environment as soon as possible to get visibility into scan results and to ensure ongoing compatibility with PHP 8.0 via the VIP Code Analysis Bot. We have added multi-version linting to the bot, so if your repository powers several sites with different versions of PHP, the bot will check the Pull Request against each enabled version. See the screenshot below for an example:
3. Review the WordPress VIP documentation “Prepare application code for a PHP version upgrade” guide and perform the recommended scan.
PHP 7.4 will stop receiving security updates on November 28, 2022. On this date, all sites on WordPress VIP still using PHP 7.4 will be upgraded to PHP 8.0 to minimize the risk from unpatched security vulnerabilities.
PHP 8.1 is also available but WordPress core does not yet fully support PHP 8.1, so we strongly recommend against running it in production at this time. PHP 8.1 is fully supported and available as part of our Software Management feature. [Updated 24 August 2022]
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