PHP 7 Now Available for All Sites on Pantheon

We are excited to announce that Pantheon now supports PHP 7. PHP 7 offers a lot of new features for developers, as well as significant increases in performance. In our internal benchmarks we intentionally put a lot of stress on PHP performance to provide a conservative estimate of gains for real world websites. Doing so, we measured PHP 7 coming in at 62% faster than PHP 5.6:

Updating PHP Safely

One of the main benefits of Pantheon's workflow is being able to test changes before they go live, and updating to PHP 7 is no exception. In fact, with this release we've changed the way PHP versions are selected to fit even better with the Dev/Test/Live workflow.

Starting today, your PHP version is determined in the pantheon.yml configuration file, which is managed in version control along with the rest of your code. To get PHP 7, simply add a pantheon.yml file or update the one that already exists, commit, and push the version change. Then start clicking around to see the improved speed and generate some data for New Relic.

If you notice any incompatibilities, you can debug it right in the development (or Multidev) environment, committing those fixes as you go. Once you have all the necessary changes in place, you can deploy the new version of PHP along with any code tweaks using the tried and true Pantheon workflow.

Because both the PHP version configuration and any necessary code changes for compatibility are tracked in version control, it's one deploy to release both to Test and then Live. It also insures nobody accidentally changes the PHP version later without going through a similar review process.

For detailed instructions, please see our documentation on supported PHP versions and using pantheon.yml.