Microsoft will not support PHP 8 on Windows

Microsoft will not support php 8.0 and later versions on Windows itself. According to the release manager of php 8.0, that doesn’t mean there won’t be any php 8.0 builds for Windows in the near future.

The removal of PHP support from version 8.0 is reported via the PHP Internals mailing list by Dale Hirt, project manager for PHP at Microsoft. He reports that support for php 7.2 on Windows will end in November and php 7.3 will only receive security updates from then on. PHP 7.4 will continue to receive both bug fixes and security updates for another year. Hirt: “However, we are not going to support PHP for Windows in any way before version 8.0 and beyond.” The final release of php 8.0 is scheduled for November 26 this year.

Sara Golemon, release manager of php 8.0, expresses her appreciation for the work Microsoft has done so far, but also expresses her disappointment. On Reddit, she clarifies that Microsoft maintains Windows.php.net and was responsible for, among other things, php.exe on Windows. Those builds are therefore no longer expected for version 8.0. She does express her expectation that there will be an automated method with which builds will still appear, ‘perhaps even by the same people who made the official builds at Microsoft’.

Microsoft started supporting PHP in Windows in 2006. The company then offered a module for its Internet Information Server, or IIS, to connect web servers to PHP clients. Most developers continued to prefer php on Linux. Within Windows 10, Microsoft has now integrated Windows Subsystem for Linux 2, which PHP developers can use.