PHP 8 is now available in Beach and Local Beach, with support in Flow and Neos right around the corner!

Neos and Flow

With the release of PHP 8 the Neos team had already started to make Neos and Flow compatible to the new version. But since we are all part of a large ecosystem, compatibility is not something we can achieve alone. So we had to wait for some of those dependencies. And we had to upgrade dependencies, meaning adjustments to changes in those. But by now all that work is done and the needed changes to support PHP 8 are merged and will be released for Neos and Flow 7.0 and up!

Beach and Local Beach

But what does support for PHP 8  help, if your hosting provider does not offer it? Nothing. That's why we are happy to offer support for PHP 8 in Beach and Local Beach now. Again, it took a while, mostly because of missing support in an important dependency. That has been solved, so we rolled out PHP 8 as an option for your instances a few days ago.

How to use it in Local Beach

Simply change the version to use in .localbeach.dist.yaml:

BEACH_PHP_IMAGE_VERSION=8.0

and (re-)start your project.

How to use it in Beach

For your instance switch the PHP version to use and deploy again:

Selecting the PHP version for an instance in Flownative Beach

Important changes

PHP 8 itself brings a number of changes, as can be expected for a major version. You should check out the dedicated PHP 8 page, changelog and migration guide if you want to upgrade your project.

Xdebug 3 is the current major version of Xdebug and the one to support PHP 8. If you have been using Xdebug with (Local) Beach, you have been using Xdebug2. Make sure to adjust as needed, the announcement and the upgrade guide should help.