The Drupal Core Development team has announced that the PHP platform requirements for Drupal 10.0.0 will be announced at least five months before its release. This was in consideration to the feedback from the Drupal community members that they would have liked to have known the Drupal 9 platform requirements before its release and not after, as was the case for Drupal 9.

The current Drupal 10 (10.0.0 alpha-1) version requires at the least PHP 8.02. The need for PHP 8.1 is still under consideration. Therefore based on this announcement, if Drupal 10.0.0 is released as per schedule on June 15, 2022, it will be with the current PHP 8.0.2 requirement. For this to happen all requirements will have to be completed by mid-March, 2022.

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There are three possible ‘release window’ scenarios as per the Drupal core release schedule. The above is the first possibility.

In the second case, if all the requirements are completed by mid-May 2022, Drupal 10 will be released on August 17th, 2022. In such a case, there will be an announcement by March 17th as to whether the PHP platform requirement is increased to PHP 8.1. If not the requirement will still be PHP 8.0.2.

Else, the last option will be to complete all the requirements by mid-September 2022 and Drupal 10 will be released on December 14th, 2002. In such a case we will know by July 14th if the platform requirement is increased to PHP 8.1.

The PHP project will be providing security support for PHP 8.0 until November 2023, but Drupal 10 is to be supported for much longer. After November 2023, some of Drupal's Composer dependencies might begin dropping support for PHP 8.0 (even though security patches for PHP 8.0 may still be there from others like Linux distributions).

Therefore, even if PHP 8.1 is not required for Drupal 10.0.0, it might be required for a future minor release of Drupal 10. Drupal Association has also announced the finalization of the database server requirements for Drupal 10. The web server requirements remain the same for Drupal 9 and 10.

Factors for Setting the PHP Version Requirement

Release schedules and requirements are always planned in such a way to make it easy for the Drupal site managers to upgrade. The factors considered are in the following order of priority as per Drupal Association https://www.drupal.org/about/core/blog/drupal-10-php-requirements-announcements are:

• The PHP version compatibility of Drupal dependencies (both now and in the future).
• The availability and use of the PHP version in the PHP ecosystem (by Linux distributions, hosting service providers, Drupal site owners, projects in the Composer ecosystem, etc.).
• The specific language features of new PHP versions when these are important for Drupal.

So the compatibility of Drupal’s dependencies is ensured with the given PHP version for several years. Also, evaluation is done to see if enough of the PHP ecosystem has adopted the PHP version for it to be a viable choice for sites upgrading from Drupal 9 to Drupal 10 in the present year. Finally, if multiple PHP versions are viable choices under both criteria, the choice of the PHP version will depend on which has the most useful language features for Drupal.

Your valuable inputs are solicited via the Survey on PHP 8.0 and 8.1 to understand your suggestions and options.

Source: Drupal.org