Now that Magento 2.3 is on the horizon we are preparing our platform for PHP 7.2. In Magento 2.3 support for PHP 7.0 will be dropped and support for 7.2 will be added. As described in our changelog for PHP 7.1, upgrading to PHP 7.2 will be a bit more involved than upgrading to the previous version. Magento heavily relied on mcrypt for encryption which has now been replaced by ext/sodium.

In the coming week(s) we will be gradually preparing our platform to support PHP 7.2 and all required extensions. We compile PHP and all related modules from scratch so that we can perform some optimizations and have more flexibility with regards to the packaging and compile time configurations than what we would get from using the standard OS versions.

Currently we have already shipped a version of the hypernode-vagrant with the core PHP packages installed. This is not enough for running Magento (because essential external modules are still missing), but if you already want to poke around and see what is new in a local development environment that is already possible.

root@beb7b8-projects-magweb-vgr ~ # dpkg -l | grep php7.2
ii  php7.2                                7.2.7-2                               all          server-side, HTML-embedded scripting language (metapackage)
ii  php7.2-bcmath                         7.2.7-2                               amd64        Bcmath module for PHP
ii  php7.2-bz2                            7.2.7-2                               amd64        bzip2 module for PHP
ii  php7.2-cli                            7.2.7-2                               amd64        command-line interpreter for the PHP scripting language
ii  php7.2-common                         7.2.7-2                               amd64        documentation, examples and common module for PHP
ii  php7.2-curl                           7.2.7-2                               amd64        CURL module for PHP
ii  php7.2-fpm                            7.2.7-2                               amd64        server-side, HTML-embedded scripting language (FPM-CGI binary)
ii  php7.2-gd                             7.2.7-2                               amd64        GD module for PHP
ii  php7.2-imap                           7.2.7-2                               amd64        IMAP module for PHP
ii  php7.2-intl                           7.2.7-2                               amd64        Internationalisation module for PHP
ii  php7.2-json                           7.2.7-2                               amd64        JSON module for PHP
ii  php7.2-ldap                           7.2.7-2                               amd64        LDAP module for PHP
ii  php7.2-mbstring                       7.2.7-2                               amd64        MBSTRING module for PHP
ii  php7.2-mysql                          7.2.7-2                               amd64        MySQL module for PHP
ii  php7.2-odbc                           7.2.7-2                               amd64        ODBC module for PHP
ii  php7.2-opcache                        7.2.7-2                               amd64        Zend OpCache module for PHP
ii  php7.2-pgsql                          7.2.7-2                               amd64        PostgreSQL module for PHP
ii  php7.2-pspell                         7.2.7-2                               amd64        pspell module for PHP
ii  php7.2-readline                       7.2.7-2                               amd64        readline module for PHP
ii  php7.2-soap                           7.2.7-2                               amd64        SOAP module for PHP
ii  php7.2-sybase                         7.2.7-2                               amd64        Sybase module for PHP
ii  php7.2-tidy                           7.2.7-2                               amd64        tidy module for PHP
ii  php7.2-xml                            7.2.7-2                               amd64        DOM, SimpleXML, WDDX, XML, and XSL module for PHP
ii  php7.2-xmlrpc                         7.2.7-2                               amd64        XMLRPC-EPI module for PHP
ii  php7.2-zip                            7.2.7-2                               amd64        Zip module for PHP

Today we will be updating various modules, including php-igbinary and php-redis to include shared libraries for PHP 7.2 as well as the previously available PHP versions. php-igbinary will remain on version 2.0.5, but the package version will change from 2.0.5-1 to 2.0.5-byte2. php-redis will be updated from 3.1.4-1-byte2 to the new version php-redis_3.1.6-1-byte1.

To see what has changed check out the pecl changelog for redis. For now we will not upgrade to beyond 4.0.0 as that would include breaking API changes that will only be supported from colinmollenhour/credis version 1.10.0 and later.