PHP 8.1 ends Security Support in November 2024.
In contrast, Moodle 4.1 ends Security Support in December 2025.
Does this mean that a version of Moodle 4.1.x is planned to support PHP 8.2?
Hi Marco,
No - Moodle 4.1 will not support PHP 8.2 per our long-established PHP Version support policy: https://moodledev.io/general/development/policies/php#policy-statement
PHP 8.2 was released after Moodle 4.1. It was also a non-trivial change which took a lot of time to achieve support.
Whilst PHP will indeed be dropping support for PHP 8.1, you will find that most vendors will actually keep their own security support for substantially longer. As a case in point, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy) shipped with PHP 8.1.2, and continues to ship with version 8.1.2. That is not to say that it is riddled with security vulnerabilities and bugs, but instead that Ubuntu have backported and applied any security fixes to that version of PHP. In fact, it's now on release 14, and it will continue to receive security support for the lifetime of the Jammy LTS. Jammy is in standard support until June 2027, and goes EOL in April 2032.
If your distribution does not provide a security-supported PHP version, you can instead upgrade Moodle to a version supporting a newer PHP version.
No - Moodle 4.1 will not support PHP 8.2 per our long-established PHP Version support policy: https://moodledev.io/general/development/policies/php#policy-statement
PHP 8.2 was released after Moodle 4.1. It was also a non-trivial change which took a lot of time to achieve support.
Whilst PHP will indeed be dropping support for PHP 8.1, you will find that most vendors will actually keep their own security support for substantially longer. As a case in point, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy) shipped with PHP 8.1.2, and continues to ship with version 8.1.2. That is not to say that it is riddled with security vulnerabilities and bugs, but instead that Ubuntu have backported and applied any security fixes to that version of PHP. In fact, it's now on release 14, and it will continue to receive security support for the lifetime of the Jammy LTS. Jammy is in standard support until June 2027, and goes EOL in April 2032.
If your distribution does not provide a security-supported PHP version, you can instead upgrade Moodle to a version supporting a newer PHP version.
Worth noting, now, that as of the end of March this year they have decided to extend the security support of PHP versions to 2 years. This gives a total of 4 years of support and pushes EOL of PHP 8.1 to the end of December 2025 which takes it beyond EOL for Moodle 4.1 LTS.
https://wiki.php.net/rfc/release_cycle_update
https://www.php.net/supported-versions.php
https://wiki.php.net/rfc/release_cycle_update
https://www.php.net/supported-versions.php