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As of July 2016, PHP branch 5.5 is unsupported. The PHP version my server currently is running is 5.5.9 which implies that the server will not receive any security updates going forwards.

I'm told that Craft recommends using 5.7. Is there any danger that parts of my website may stop working if the PHP is updated?

Lindsey D
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patrick.altair
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    My OCD won't let this go, but PHP went from 5.6 to 7.0. There is no PHP 5.7. – Brad Bell Aug 05 '16 at 17:56
  • @BradBell Oh right, that's strange haha, why no 6? The person who told me this must've just had a typo and actually meant 7. – patrick.altair Aug 06 '16 at 20:50
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    There was going to be a PHP 6, but it's a long and painful story. https://philsturgeon.uk/php/2014/07/23/neverending-muppet-debate-of-php-6-v-php-7/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8786919 – Brad Bell Aug 07 '16 at 04:21

2 Answers2

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Don't worry, you should be fine.

Craft currently supports a minimum of PHP 5.3. Any higher version of PHP is also compatible.

When Craft 3 ships (late 2016 / early 2017), it will require a minimum of PHP 5.6.

Side note... If you're about to upgrade PHP, I highly recommend switching to PHP 7. The performance boost is notable, and should speed up your site by about 50-80%!

Lindsey D
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What OS are you running? Since you mentioned PHP 5.5.9, it sounds like you might be running Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty), which is a LTS release.

Unless you're using a 3rd party package (like a Ubuntu PPA) or compiled PHP yourself, 5.5 isn't suddenly going to stop being supported.

CentOS/RHEL or a Ubuntu LTS release all have long term support that backport any security fixes if necessary to the older distros. (What's confusing is you might be getting security fixes from, say 5.5.34, but the package maintainers don't bump the version because you're not actually running it. This is a common false positive in PCI compliance scans, for example.)

In these kinds of things, I would spin up a VPS or fire up MAMP and test the install yourself. While Craft itself runs fine in my experience, you could run into trouble with plugins.

That said, I'll echo Lindsey's answer and agree that PHP 7 screams. Skip the 5.x branch if you're not running any other software and jump on 7 if you plan to upgrade because you'll be upgrading to it at some point anyway.

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RitterKnight
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