Daily Archives: 13th of September 2015

Moving php.ug to PHP7

The map of PHP-Usergroups on php.ug finally runs on PHP7!

But the transformation wasn’t as painless as I thought and would have expected. Therefore I want to share my experiences here.

First of all the provider that php.ug runs at already was compiling PHP7 when I thought about switching. That was cool and I can only recommend uberspace to anyone!

The first issue we encountered was the default path to the mysql-sock. By default it showed not to the actual socket-file so I had to alter the php.ini to point php to the right mysql-socket-file. That of course only applies for those that interact with mysql and do so on a socket and not via network. But that’s an issue for the hoster and they sorted it out fine after we found the issue together.

The second (and only other ) thing that caught me was the many new reserved words and libraries using those words (like String or Float) as class names. That had to cause havoc and I had to change some of the dependencies to use alpha-versions. Not really that good, but PHP7 isn’t finalized so I don’t see any way around it.

After those two issues where resolved (and some minor things I’ve created in my own dependencies) everything worked fine.

Thanks to everyone involved in creating PHP7 for an – after all – easy transition!