DrupalCI PHP Support Policy

DrupalCI offers several variants of PHP for testing both Drupal 7 and Drupal 8. 

Legacy Environments (Unsupported by upstream)

The following environments are available as permanent, legacy environments for testing Drupal 7 and Drupal 8. Legacy environments are now unsupported by PHP, and will receive no updates or releases:

• PHP 5.3.29 (Drupal 7 only)
• PHP 5.4.45 (Drupal 7 only)
• PHP 5.5.38 (Drupal 7 only after March 2019)

Security Only Environments

There are currently two 'security only' environment for php. These environments will only get updates if a grave security issue is found that requires mitigation. For security only environments, we will provide the most recent full release.

• PHP 5.6.x (Currently 5.6.33) (Drupal 7 only after March 2019)
• PHP 7.0.x (Currently 7.0.27)

Actively Supported Environments

These environments are fully released versions of PHP that continue to get bugfixes and improvements. As such, we will offer the most recently released version as well as a daily build of the branch so that we can detect incoming breaking changes. Point releases are put out roughly monthly, so we should expect to see more frequent changes in these environments. 

• PHP 7.1.13
• PHP 7.1.x
• PHP 7.2.1
• PHP 7.2.x 

Unreleased Development Environments

PHP runs on a yearly release cycle, and about six months before a full release, they begin the alpha/beta/release candidate phase (more details here: (http://blog.krakjoe.ninja/2018/01/sensible-targets.html). We will provide an environment that can test against this pre-release php in order to discover any changes that need to be made to Drupal before the latest version of PHP is released. 

To limit the number of pre-release updates and the necessity of 'chasing HEAD' we will limit the scope of any pre-release PHP environment container updates to:

• One update for alpha
• One update for beta
• One update for RC
• One update Stable
• With an exception for an update if there's a known bug affecting us that has been fixed.

This will achieve the sweet spot of shielding us from broken upstream HEAD and build changes, and give us a stable enough target to shake out any major bugs that result from a new release.

Environment Configuration:

Currently all php environments run on a container that has apache as the webserver, running as mod_php with mpm_prefork, with a shared APCu cache between all apache workers. The specific configuration files can be found at http://cgit.drupalcode.org/drupalci_environments/tree/dockerfile_templat...