WordPress 5.2 and PHP 7.3

A short blog with a quick update to this one about PHP, this time with a little WordPress 5.2!

I’d updated my WordPress jail to PHP 7.2 not too long ago, but the recent WordPress 5.2 update introduced the Site Health Check, and this reported that my PHP version was out of date.

Whilst that is definitely true, I’m still on a supported version, but given how easy it has been to update last time and reports suggesting the latest 7.3 PHP version plays nicely with WordPress I thought I’d update.

It wasn’t quite as straight forward as the last time, as the WordPress package hasn’t been updated for PHP 7.3, so after updating PHP with the following command, it uninstalled WordPress!

pkg install php73 php73-ctype php73-curl php73-filter php73-ftp php73-gd php73-hash php73-json php73-mysqli php73-openssl php73-pear php73-simplexml php73-tokenizer php73-xml php73-zip php73-zlib php73-bcmath php73-exif php73-fileinfo pkg install php72-pecl-imagick

Reinstalling WordPress, depreciated PHP back to 7.2! The solution was to update PHP to 7.3 and then install WordPress 5.1.1 from ports (check out www.freshports.org) before updating WordPress to 5.2

A bit of a long way around and I half expected it to screw up my database and result in me rolling back the snapshots I’d taken, but it all worked out without needing my ‘backup’ plan.

So this site is now running the latest version of WordPress and PHP. Happy days…