Possible impact of the latest PHP upgrade
 

Hi,

I'm running Slackware64 14.0 on a public server with a few "production" hostings on it. On the latest count, there are a few instances of the following PHP applications:

• CMS Made Simple
• Squirrelmail
• GEPI
• Wordpress
• OwnCloud
• Dolibarr

Now I wonder if these applications will survive the upgrade from PHP 5.4 to 5.6. What are your experiences?

Cheers,

Niki

Best option: create a virtual machine, rsync your production machine's filesystem into the VM, check what happens in the VM. Ponder possible production problems.

The main reason I posted my initial message was precisely to avoid the chore you mention. I know I can test things in a sandbox. I just wanted to ask folks using one or more of the apps I listed if they were running it on a more recent version of PHP. If their simple answer was "yes, it works OK", then it takes me ten seconds to do a simple 'slackpkg upgrade php' and move on.

Niki

• CMS Made Simple -- Seems the core system will work, but 3rd-party modules may not.
• Squirrelmail -- Might need version 1.5.2.
• GEPI -- Seems to be French based, but there was at least one site that said it was running PHP 5.6.
• Wordpress -- Seems to work fine, but 3rd-party plugins may not.
• OwnCloud -- Seems some had issues with the upgrade, but it ended up being the hosts problem.
• Dolibarr -- Fix committed in Sep 2014, but I'm not sure what version it made it in to.

Just some quick Google searching... YMMV

Thanks very much!

One thing you really have to look out for is the OpenSSL changes in PHP 5.6. This really bit me in the ass with my Roundcube install. I have a valid SSL certificate and my server's hostname matches my SSL certificate, however, in my Roundcube configuration file I had tls://localhost set up for my IMAP/SMTP connection. The name 'localhost' does not match what's in my certificate so I had to change it to tls://mail.domain.com which did match my certificate. Of course you can also disable peer verification as stated in the link above but I decided to just use my hostname since it's a single user server and I'd rather not mess with /etc/php.ini if I don't have to.

You should still test it anyway even if others say it works. Different plugins and configurations will have different impacts for different users.