Supporting unmaintained PHP versions

By Christophe Dujarric, on Nov 29, 2018

PHP evolves at a great pace. The good news is that the PHP team does a great job at maintaining previous versions:

  • 7.3 is expected December 6th 2018
  • 7.0 will be maintained until December 3rd 2018
  • 5.6 will be maintained until December 31st 2018.

Some even already talk about 8.0.

At Blackfire, we are of course aware that some applications might not be updated to benefit from the most up to date PHP version. For some projects, upgrading may require important migrations. It takes time and money. And meanwhile, applications still need to run smoothly and fast in production.

That’s why at the time of writing, Blackfire supports PHP version from 5.3 to 7.2 (5.4 and higher on Windows). And we’ll always make sure to support newer versions as fast as we can, hopefully even on the very date of their release.

Supporting all of those versions and providing a great developer experience, when it comes to installing and upgrading Blackfire, represents quite an investment on our end. This is the reason why, starting Monday, December 3rd 2018, profiling under PHP 5.3 to 7.0 will require at least a Profiler subscription.

If you were looking for another reason to move away from unmaintained PHP versions, here you are 😉

Don’t hesitate to reach out if you have questions about our paid subscriptions!

Christophe Dujarric

Christophe is the Chief Product Officer at Blackfire. He's an engineer, but probably one of the least "tech" people in the company. He's wearing many hats, from product management to marketing and sales. He loves the beauty of simple solutions that solve actual problems.