PHP Normalization Across Rare Use Cases

On WP Cloud, web applications and WP CLI honor a site’s specified PHP version and SSH sessions default to the specified version when it is invoked using php. However, we have identified some discrepancies in rare use cases that we will be normalizing going forward on Tuesday, 17 September 2024.

• /usr/local/bin/php in our chroots still refers to PHP 7.4; we will advance this to PHP 8.2.
• We will update the PATH variable so that !/usr/bin/env php also honors the site’s specified PHP version.

We anticipate that the former change may only affect scripts that directly reference /usr/local/bin/php that are potentially incompatible with PHP 8.2. The latter change should make it easier for scripts to use the site’s preferred PHP version.