Does SuiteCRM 7.14.0 support PHP 8.0

💬 General Discussion
1

Hello,
Does SuiteCRM 7.14.0 support PHP 8.0 after upgrading from SuiteCRM 7.12.5 using the upgrade wizard?

Thanks
Mehul Bhandari

@clemente.raposo

2

Hi,
Check this Compatibility Matrix :: SuiteCRM Documentation
it looks as this version supports PHP 8.1 and 8.2

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3

This may help understand that option:

https://www.php.net/supported-versions.php

4

We are currently using SuiteCRM 7.12.12 with PHP 7.4. Considering on upgrading PHP to version 8 soon.
We would like to bring it up directly to PHP 8.1 or 8.2. However, in the compatibility matrix, it only shows that 7.12.x is compatible with PHP 8.0.

Do you think that documentation might be outdated? And that 7.12.12 actually supports PHP 8.1 or/and 8.2?
As with 7.14.x PHP 8.1 or 8.2 is required, it would be great that 7.12.X would be compatible with at least PHP 8.1.

5

I think the documentation is correct.

v7.14 is precisely the version that was developed to support PHP v8.1 and 8.2.

The support for 8.0 was always shaky, I don’t really recommend it.

Any reason why you don’t upgrade your SuiteCRM 7.12.12 to 7.14?

6

Hi @pgr,

Thanks for your message.

We just upgraded to 7.12.12, trying to reduce the gap before we jump to the major version 7.14.

Our problem is that we can’t upgrade SuiteCRM + upgrade PHP at the same time to all our hosts. Our current server provider doesn’t allow to change PHP version massively.

Therefore we wanted to slowly upgrade to PHP 8.1/8.2 while we are in 7.12.12. However we’ve just realized that that version only support until PHP 8.0.

Any recommendations?

We are considering on just testing PHP 8.1 with our current SuiteCRM 7.12.12.

7

The advances in PHP version support in SuiteCRM are hit-and-miss.

It’s basically impossible to get the entire compatibility right at first. This is due to the huge code base, some of it very old, some of it very bad code (along with many very nice parts :slight_smile: ).

So whenever people announce version X compatibility, what it really means is: we tried this SuiteCRM on the new PHP, solved a few bugs, and released it. Then the battle really starts, as the community installs it on many different set ups and effectively tests a lot of code paths that weren’t really tested before.

What this means is that PHP compatibility increases after a few releases. So the good PHP v8.0 version is the one 3 or 4 releases after the original announcement of PHP v8.0 compatibility.

So I am not too optimistic about your progressive adoption strategy, you might be losing your time using past SuiteCRM versions that won’t be very stable in the newer PHP’s any way. And the jump from PHP 7 to 8 is the really significant one. In the latest SuiteCRM versions, when it seemed that the work was to get from 8.0 to 8.2 compatibility, what was really happening was that the SuiteCRM team of finally taking their time to get the big 7-to-8 transition right, only they aimed directly for the newer 8.2 to save some steps along the way.

I guess you could just go for 7.14 and (since you have that coding ability) fix your own compatibility bugs, with any luck it will be just a handful of them.

8

Thanks @pgr for the extended response.

We understand the difficulties of adapting the whole SugarCRM/SuiteCRM core to new PHP version and the importance of the community validation.

We’ll be working with this information, probably following your advice.