A lot of those large web properties are going to be using old versions of PHP. Newer versions have breaking changes that make upgrading a large codebase difficult.
To these companies, PHP 7 is a hip new language that they're not using.
To these companies, PHP 7 is a hip new language that they're not using.
Is that true? PHP 5.6 and 7.0 were EOL'd in 2018, and acording to data at https://blog.packagist.com/php-versions-stats-2019-1-edition... the use of PHP 7 and later is ~90%. Web properties like DreamHost have supported PHP 7+ for years, and have deprecated versions before 7.1.
> Newer versions have breaking changes that make upgrading a large codebase difficult.
The documentation on this is pretty good[1], and there's some nice tooling that can help[2]. I wouldn't say that I've migrated "large" codebases, but FWIW in my limited experience this hasn't been particularly onerous.
[1] See https://www.php.net/manual/en/migration70.php and related appendices [2] https://auth0.com/blog/migrating-a-php5-app-to-7-part-three/
I can believe that, even if I don't understand the mindset. Unless they're ready to retire, you'd think they'd want to keep their toolboxes current.
For Red Hat, that means there are places still on RHEL 5, 6, and 7, which is going to put them PHP at 5.4.
It looks like Ubuntu 16 is the oldest Ubuntu still under support. That had PHP 7.0. Ubuntu end-of-life (when they stop getting security updates) are later than end of support. Ubuntu 14 EOL is April 2022. That has PHP 5.5.9.
Debian 8 has long term support until June 2020, and PHP 5.6. Debian 9 has LTS to June 2022, and PHP 7.0.
For those who are on the latest LTS or equivalent:
RHEL 8 has PHP 7.2.
Ubuntu 18 has PHP 7.2.24
Debian 10 has PHP 7.3.