On October 24th we will start a large scale roll out of PHP 7 to WordPress.com VIP servers. We intend to transition one of the origin datacenters completely to PHP 7. We do not anticipate a negative impact on performance or site availability during the transition. This transition does not include servers dedicated to VIP Go, they will be transitioned at a later time.
PHP 7 was released in December of 2015 and is running on many large scale PHP deployments. PHP 7 brings important performance improvements and will decrease uncached page load times.
The VIP team has been testing the rollout of PHP 7 since late summer. We have gone through all themes and plugins to find code that would not be compatible, and have opened tickets with clients for all major issues. At this point, all such issues have been fixed. We are currently running VIP developer sandboxes on PHP 7 as well as on a few production hosts. If all goes according to plan, we hope to have PHP 7 running on all production servers on November 1st.
There are still some PHP warnings that have not been addressed in some client repositories. We have started committing directly to repositories if we see any PHP Warnings generated from the move to PHP7. Many of the ones we are currently seeing are regarding function declarations that need to match the function declaration of the class they are extending.
If you have not already done so, please switch to PHP 7 in your development and pre-production environments. As always, development and non-production environments should be running with WP_DEBUG set to true as to find any and all PHP warnings.
As a reminder you can see the full list of backwards-incompatible changes here: http://php.net/manual/en/migration70.incompatible.php .
If you have any questions feel free to open a ticket with us.
Exciting! What’s the process to convert Quickstart environments?
If you update your quickstart it should automatically be running PHP 7.
I upgraded all of my dev and deploy environments last week. It’s smart to upgrade the packages in any case.
I just did a
sudo apt-get update && time sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
Followed by
shutdown -rf now
On really old systems the apt-get update will give you warning about the legacy php 5 not being supported, but that’s resolved by the subsequent dist-upgrade.
Does this mean we can use newer version of Ubuntu for staging server Quickstart environments? This page still lists 12.04:
https://vip.wordpress.com/documentation/vip/quickstart/staging-environment/
pre-commit hook fails on php7 syntax though :/
I’m sure the next question will be: Specifically what syntax causes an issue?
I don’t think we are at the point where we can guarantee that all servers at Automattic are running PHP7. Many if not most of them are but various servers running various things may not already be upgraded.