More PHP Updates

It feels like quite a long time since I blogged about PHP, and that’s because it is!  Over 5 years, to be precise.  Unsurprisingly, none of the supported versions of PHP I was running back then (7.2 and 7.3)  are supported today.  How about we start with a similar timeline from the PHP website:

As you can see, only 7.3 is still visible on their support roadmap, and support for that ended back in 2021!  7.4 is pretty much the minimum most web-based applications will work with now, but support for this ended just a year later, at the end of 2022.

Fortunately, most of my online services are running supported versions, but some are proving more problematic to update than others, and I’m not entirely sure how to upgrade them all.

The process for updating my TrueNAS/FreeBSD jails is still pretty much as described in the blog from five years ago. The PHP modules change occasionally, with some dropped as they’ve been included in the core and some new ones added, but they’re mostly pretty straightforward. Here’s a quick table of my services using PHP:

LimeSurvey is running in a FreeBSD jail, which I’ve updated to 13.4.  This will undoubtedly cause me problems, as 7.4 is no longer supported, so a pkg update && pkg upgrade will break things by removing PHP.  I have updated the database to 10.6, and LimeSurvey is running the latest version. Still, when I update PHP to anything other than 7.4, I get the error reported here on the LimeSurvey forum.  When I get some free time, I’ll play around a bit more, but this one might need to be rebuilt, perhaps starting to move away from jails to docker containers.

I rebuilt MediaWiki as much as a test as anything when I had some database upgrade issues. This is running a supported version and could be upgraded further if required. The suggested version was 8.2, so that’s where I went.

I upgraded NextCloud to the latest version, and that seems to be running fine, although I have noticed a few issues in the TrueNAS console where PHP is exiting in this jail, so I will need to keep an eye on things:

Nov  4 13:21:48 freenas0 kernel: pid 29684 (php-fpm), jid 36, uid 80: exited on signal 10

Pi-hole is running in its own VM, following the instructions on the website and using the simple curl build script. Other than updating things when I noticed a new version, I’ve not tried to do anything with PHP. It’s still receiving security updates until the end of 2025, so I have about 12 months before I need to do anything.

My live WordPress jail, where this blog is hosted, runs 8.2 and could be updated to 8.3. I’m not really sure why I haven’t done that, so I will before the end of the year. UPDATE 10-Nov-24: It is now running 8.3.12!

My test WordPress jail is running in a VM as a docker container, and other than updating WordPress, I’ve not touched the docker container.  This is still running 7.3, and I really need to consider updating this, but I’m unsure where to begin.  I will need to understand Docker a little more than I currently do if I’m considering migrating from TrueNAS Core to Scale at some point in the future, so this might be a good place to start.  It wouldn’t be the end of the world if I completely broke this and needed to create a new test environment.

Anyway, this is starting to sound like one of my annual ‘state of the server’ blogs, and given we’re not too far from the end of the year, I might be doing one of those again, very soon (sorry, Chris)