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PHP 7.1 & Dotdeb

Dotdeb is a one-man project that is providing up-to-date PHP packages for more than 14 years now, and I’m very proud and grateful for the community that gathered around it.

From the start, my goal has been to sustain the effort of backporting packages with reliability and compatibility with stock Debian distributions in mind. People got that and have been trusting in Dotdeb and deploying it on thousands of development and production stacks. Thank you very much for that! I mean it.

But it’s 2017 now and I’m afraid to say that – for personal and professional reasons – my focus has shifted a bit off the PHP ecosystem. Since PHP 7.0 has been released, I’m struggling with publishing PHP packages with added value. I mostly did just backports from Debian Sid, without any major changes or contributions. It has been a very frustrating situation for everyone: for me, for Dotdeb users; and for Debian maintainers who now provide either official Debian backports or Debian Personal Archives (DPA).

Because it makes no sense to duplicate the effort any longer, and as long as such viable alternatives exist, Dotdeb won’t provide any package of PHP 7.1 and later.

If you want to install PHP 7.1+ on your machine or just seamlessly upgrade it, you should definitely take a look at deb.sury.org. That’s where Ondřej Surý publishes PHP packages for

  • Debian and Ubuntu,
  • on i386, amd64 and even armhf and arm64 architectures!

He is the official Debian maintainer of the core PHP packages (+ many other PHP modules) and he does a great job providing everything you need to run recent versions of PHP. Depending on the Debian backports team’s decision, these packages could even be available on jessie-backports.

Thanks again for trusting and using Dotdeb all these years for your PHP packages.

Please note that:

  • to keep existing installations/cookbooks/playbooks running and secure, I’ll keep publishing updates of PHP 5.6 for Wheezy and PHP 7.0 for Jessie as long as these versions and distributions are not EOL,
  • other Dotdeb packages are unaffected by this decision and I’ll keep providing them for the current stable & oldstable distributions.

29 replies on “PHP 7.1 & Dotdeb”

Thanks a lot for all your outstanding work! dotDeb is going to be remembered for a long time 😉

I have been using dotdeb for years, and I cannot thank you enough for all the work you have been saving me. Fully understand your decision, though. Many thanks for your great work over the times!

Thank you for all the great work you’ve done with maintaining recent PHP packages for Debian. I’ve been using the dotdeb repository for years now and never had any issue with it. This surely says a lot about the quality of the packages that you’ve maintained all this time. THANK YOU!!!

Thanks for all your hard work and your dedication to provide security releases until they are EOL!

Now a simple question. How’s the migration going to be for someone using your packages? Is it just a matter of removing yours from sources.list and doing

“`
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/apache2
sudo apt-get update
“`

Has anyone transitioned to onderj packages on Debian 8 from PHP 7.0?

Thank you. I am a recent dotdeb user, understanding, and appreciative despite no ongoing support for the one module I was hoping to see soon.
Hoping the change results in a positive difference in your life. Take care and thank you.

Thank a lot for your work! Definitely gonna miss DotDeb.

In order to get PHP 7.1.. Just add the Repo (deb.sury.org) and run apt-get update – upgrade?

can we trust deb.sury.org ???
something is really stange.
i installed php7.0 and apparmor shows the apache profile wants now full rw access to /

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