PHP 5.6 now available on Simple Hosting

PHP version 5.6 is now available on Simple Hosting and becomes the new default choice for instance creation.

You can create PHP 5.6 instances right now, or keep creating PHP 5.4 instances by specifically selecting them from the list.

We have published a guide to help you migrate from PHP 5.4 to PHP 5.6. You’ll find testing and migration tips if you plan to move your projects to the new instances.

We also plan to release an automatic upgrade feature for PHP 5.4/MySQL instances on March 22nd, 2016. Other instance types will always have to be migrated manually.

Our Customer Care team is ready to answer your questions and assist you during the migration. Please contact them should you need any help.

The new PHP 5.6 instance runs on a new system image based on Debian 8 (Jessie) in anticipation of more novelties. Your feedback is very important!

Bonus: Dependency management with Composer

You can now use Composer, PHP’s most popular dependency manager, to easily install your application’s dependencies on Simple Hosting (supported on PHP 5.6 and 5.4 instances).

Dependency management tools make it easy for web developers to keep track of third-party code included in a project. Instead of having to manage the files and versions manually, these tools offer a simple way to list an application’s external dependencies and then take care of downloading, installing and including the correct files.

Simple Hosting already supported dependency managers for Node.js, Python and Ruby instances using the “npm”, “pip” and “bundler” tools respectively. With the addition of Composer to the PHP instance, we now cover modern development workflows on all instance types.

Check out the example project and the documentation to learn more and get started with Composer on Simple Hosting.