Dropping support for PHP 8.1 & 8.2

[simonhamp]

Hey folks,

As we get ever closer to releasing v1 - we are now just weeks away at the most! - one important detail that we're changing is PHP version support.

In order to keep NativePHP moving forwards, lower the burden on maintainers and contributors, and to reduce our overall compute and bandwidth usage, we will be dropping support for older versions of PHP.

This means that, from an upcoming v1 beta release we will only be supporting the 2 latest minor releases of PHP.

Right now, that's 8.3 and 8.4.

Full details of supported versions is available in our Support Policy matrix.

How to upgrade

NativePHP uses a version-matching approach when developing and building your apps: if you're using PHP 8.3 in your dev environment, the PHP 8.3 binary will be bundled with your app.

You do not need to do anything specific to choose which version of PHP will be used.

We aim to keep this same approach, so if the version of PHP you are using in development does not match an available version in NativePHP, we will use the closest available version.

However, this introduces potential inconsistencies between your development environment and the runtime environment that your apps are using.

I believe that for you to have the smoothest development experience, your development environment should behave as similarly as possible to the version that your apps will ship, so we'll be doing some work to try to make this as easy as we can for you.

Of course, if you're using tools like Laravel Herd, you may simply upgrade the versions of PHP on a per-project basis to suit the needs of your NativePHP apps.

When

This change will come into effect in the next few days and will be clearly called out in the relevant release.

You can continue to use older releases to develop your apps and we will continue to support those for a time after v1 is released, but the timeframe for that support isn't determined and we will be strongly encouraging everyone to upgrade their apps to v1 as soon as possible.

Thanks for your support and understanding 🙏🏼

[abdellahaarab]

Es ist tatsächlich eine gute Sache, Computerressourcen zu schonen.