ANNOUNCEMENT: Sunset announcement of older PHP versions

All versions of PHP older than 8.2 will be retired

Since ibiblio strives to support contributors with slow, steady, and stable updates, we are consolidating our infrastructure on a minimum version of PHP of 8.2. The architecture changes required to make this change should also make future changes smoother and more transparent for our contributors.

Sunset of older PHP begins on Wednesday July 31st

On the morning of Wednesday the 31st of July of 2024, any remaining vhost infrastructure running an older version of PHP than 8.2 will be disabled. While there may be collections outside of the vhost infrastructure that take additional days to migrate, contributors should assume that at any time after July 31st, if their collection relies on a PHP older than 8.2, it may be upgraded without prior notice.

How this change will happen

Some domain names in the vhost infrastructure are already using new web infrastructure that sits behind the load balancer pair responsible for vhosts. Contributors who request help or request an early migration will have traffic for their domain(s) redirected from the current infrastructure to the new hosts.

For any contributors who do not make a specific request about when their domain will be migrated, on the morning of the 31st, they can expect a brief (seconds or minutes, not hours) set of outages as their domain is redirected to a newer backend.

Testing and getting help

If your ibiblio-hosted collection is not ready to transition to PHP 8.2 or newer, you should reach out to us via the help request form immediately. If for some reason a ticket opened there is not acknowledged within two business days, please feel free to comment here with your request # from RT. Please avoid giving detailed information such as usernames, passwords, or software versions here in this forum, as it is public.