PHP 8.6 Beta 1 Released for Testing

Developers can now test PHP 8.6.0 Beta 1, which the PHP team released on 13 August 2026 as the first beta in the PHP 8.6 development cycle. PHP describes the release as an early test version and says it should not be used in production. The project is asking developers to test the build and report issues through its GitHub tracker.

The milestone also begins PHP 8.6's soft feature freeze. The official release timetable required RFCs targeting PHP 8.6 to be merged by 11 August and their voting to be concluded by Beta 1, while the hard feature freeze is scheduled for 22 September 2026. Beta 2 is planned for 27 August, followed by Beta 3 on 10 September, the first release candidate on 24 September, and general availability on 19 November 2026.

The Beta 1 change record includes the new Time\Duration class, a stateless closure cache, and new deprecations and error-handling changes. The official PHP 8.6 upgrade notes also list partial function application, the clamp() function, and new Io\Poll APIs among the additions in the branch. The upgrading notes deprecate spl_object_hash() in favour of spl_object_id().

That deprecation has already reached Drupal's compatibility work. Drupal core's PHP 8.6 tracking issue records new warnings after Beta 1, including use of spl_object_hash() in Drupal\Component\DependencyInjection\ReverseContainer, with a follow-up issue opened to replace it. Drupal core began running unit and component tests against PHP 8.6 on its main development branch earlier in the release cycle. Drupal's PHP requirements page still lists PHP 8.6 as unsupported, making the current work compatibility testing rather than a declaration of production support.