PHP 7.4 compatibility scanning and deployment to develop environments

This notice relates to the following platforms: VIP Go

On December 15, 2020, the WordPress VIP team will be deploying PHP 7.4 to develop environments on VIP Go as part of our PHP 7.4 release schedule. This is a minor version update bringing new features and bug fixes to the VIP Go platform.

To complement this action, we’ll also be scanning your code base with PHPCompatibilityWP, which will create new GitHub issues with the results.

Action is required from your development team, so we ask that you make them aware of the following information.

PHP 7.4 deployed to develop environments on 15 December 2020

On December 15, 2020, the WordPress VIP team will be deploying PHP 7.4 to develop environments. This will provide you with an environment on the VIP Go platform to test code changes in readiness for the platform-wide upgrade scheduled for February 23, 2021.

Scanner creating new issues in GitHub

To help quick-start your testing, we will also be scanning your code base with PHPCompatibilityWP and creating new GitHub issues for incompatibilities it identifies.

Our scan will group incompatibilities it identifies on a folder-by-folder basis and will create a new GitHub issue for each folder containing an incompatibility. Despite this grouping, it’s possible that hundreds of issues will be created. Depending on your GitHub notification settings, GitHub may send notifications to your team.

The WordPress VIP team will also open a support ticket with you containing links to these issues once the scan is complete. Please use this ticket to ask questions and when you’re comfortable your codebase is compatible, you can request your remaining environments be upgraded ahead of the scheduled platform-wide release if desired.

Addressing incompatibility issues

Once our scanner has created GitHub issues, we recommend progressing through the following steps in your local development environment before deploying code to VIP Go:

1. Updating your local development environments to PHP 7.4.
2. Adding the PHPCompatibilityWP ruleset to your PHPCS implementation, and using testVersion 7.3- to run the relevant compatibility checks.
3. If you are making use of Git submodules, we recommend scanning those as well.
4. Reviewing and acting on issues raised.

Once compatibility warnings have been addressed, we also recommend you perform integration or end-to-end testing to confirm applications behave as expected.