Due to incompatibilities between PHP 8.x and Drupal 8.x and 9.x, which have reached end of support, Acquia will be offering a one time extension for D8.x and D9.x applications currently utilizing the gratis long-term support for PHP 7.4 for Cloud Platform Enterprise, Acquia Site Factory applications, and Cloud Platform Professional applications in an effort to provide additional time for our customers to make the transition to a supported version of Drupal and to PHP 8.2.  

For customers who require an extension beyond the 29 March 2024 extension, PHP 7.4 LTS will continue to be available as a paid subscription. This service will be provided at additional nominal cost. If you are interested in accessing long-term support for PHP 7.4 after 29 March 2024, contact your account manager.

 

After 29 March 2024, we will remove PHP 7.4 from the Acquia Cloud platform and convert all remaining environments at that time to PHP 8.2. This deadline will not be extended, as it is critical your application be upgraded to ensure its continued security. Please note that while customers will be able to move to PHP 8.1 Acquia recommends moving to PHP 8.2 in order to avoid a second upgrade in the same calendar year when PHP 8.1 reaches its end of life on 1 October 2024. 

 

FAQs

Q: Is there any action required on my part?

All environments for all applications must be upgraded to at least PHP 8.1 before 29 March 2024 (unless you purchase PHP 7.4 LTS). Prior to that date, you should upgrade your non-production applications to test for any incompatibilities in your application. We recommend beginning with your non-production upgrades as soon as possible to ensure you have time to test, prior to upgrading your production application. Once you have resolved any incompatibilities, upgrade your production environment before the end-of-life deadline. See Configuring PHP settings for instructions on changing your PHP version.

Beginning in April all Acquia Cloud applications without a paid PHP 7.4 LTS subscription will be upgraded to PHP 8.2 automatically as part of regular maintenance, as communicated to customers by email.

 

Q: How would Acquia recommend I proceed with preparing for my PHP upgrade?

We advise upgrading your development environment first to detect any potential problems in your codebase. Then, we recommend using your staging environment to test any changes that might need to be carried over before upgrading your production environment.

For some Acquia Cloud Platform customers, you are able to create a CD environment to test PHP 8.1 before converting your production environment. More information about CD environments can be found at Acquia Cloud CD. If you do not have access to Acquia Cloud CD environments, please contact your account manager for additional details.

 

Q: I am using Acquia Cloud Site Factory. How do I upgrade? 

Acquia recently released a self-service option for Acquia Cloud Site Factory applications. Customers with applications using Acquia Cloud Site Factory can now configure the PHP settings on their application. Please refer to our article, “Configuring PHP settings” for more information. 

 

Q: Will there be any downtime for my non-production environments or production application?

There will be a moment or two of interrupted service for some connections as PHP restarts. Any content cached by Varnish will not be impacted. Code changes may be required to ensure your production application operates as expected once you upgrade to PHP 8.1. 

 

Q: How does this impact applications currently running Drupal 8.x?

 As Drupal 8.x has reached its end of life with Drupal.org , no version of Drupal 8.x is compatible with PHP 8.x. If an application is still utilizing Drupal 8.x, it will need to be upgraded to Drupal 9.3 or higher in order to upgrade from PHP 7.4 to PHP 8.1 and to Drupal 10.x in order to upgrade from PHP 7.4 to PHP 8.2. Please contact your account manager in order to discuss your options if needed.

Q: How does this impact applications currently running Drupal 9.x?

For customers with applications running Drupal 9.x, PHP 8.1 requires a minimal Drupal version of Drupal 9.3.0 or higher. More information regarding Drupal 8 and PHP 8.1 support can be found on Drupal.org.

Information is available for any potential compatibility issues on Drupal.org. There are no known compatibility issues with Drupal 9.3.x and PHP 8.1.

Unfortunately, no version of Drupal 9.x supports PHP 8.2. It is advised to upgrade to Drupal 10 to ensure compatibility before the EOL of PHP 8.1 later this year. Customers who are not yet ready to perform a Drupal 10 upgrade should consider purchasing PHP 7.4 LTS.

 

Q: Are there any other changes related to my PHP upgrade that I should know about?

None at this time. New Relic on the Acquia Cloud platform now works with PHP 8.1.

 

Q: Are there any tools that can assist with this migration from  PHP 7.4 free LTS to PHP 8.1?

There are two external tools that can be used to audit codebases for migration to PHP 8.1 that may help with the conversion from PHP 7.4 free LTS, PHP_CodeSniffer and PHPCompatibility. 

 

Q: Is the upgrade to PHP 8.2 available?

Yes, PHP 8.2 is available for all Acquia Cloud applications. As PHP 8.1 will reach its end of life on Tuesday, 1 October 2024 some customers may choose to jump multiple versions in order to avoid two PHP upgrades in a single calendar year.

Note that no version of Drupal 8 or 9 currently supports PHP 8.2, so customer codebases must be running at least Drupal 10.0 to upgrade to PHP 8.2. Customers who are not yet ready to perform a Drupal 10 upgrade should consider purchasing PHP 7.4 LTS.

 

Q: Are there other major software upgrades on Acquia Cloud coming soon?

We are committed to maintaining the security and stability of the Acquia Cloud platform. To do so, we are consistently removing software that has reached end-of-life and adding new features on an ongoing basis. We work to provide as much lead time as possible whenever this happens, in order to ensure your application runs smoothly while these upgrades and retirement efforts are underway. For more information on other upcoming retirements, please see our Software End-of-Life Schedule.

 

Q: I have some additional questions and concerns. Who can I contact?

If you have any questions about this or any other maintenance, you can contact Acquia Support.¶