PHP 7.1 & Dotdeb

January 26, 2017 · Guillaume Plessis

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.

Pothi Kalimuthu January 27, 2017
Completely understood. Thanks for your ongoing efforts on existing PHP versions and on other packages.
Sébastien January 27, 2017
Thank you for your work !!!
Eric Lemoine January 27, 2017
Thanks for the amazing work all these years :)
Benoit Jacquemont January 27, 2017
Thanks a lot for all your outstanding work! dotDeb is going to be remembered for a long time ;)
David January 27, 2017
Thank for this great work. You’ve helped us a lot
Cyril January 27, 2017
Merci moulfrite pour tout le boulot réalisé !
Torsten January 27, 2017
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!
Vasilis January 27, 2017
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!!!
Mikhail January 27, 2017
Thank you for update!
There is no php7.1-redis package at deb.sury.org :(
Any suggestions on how to install it? Thank you.
- Guillaume Plessis January 27, 2017
  @Mikhail : Packages of PECL and 3rd-party extensions are named php-* there I think, eg php-redis.
XhmikosR January 27, 2017
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?
Luis Tar Quince January 27, 2017
I’ve used dotdeb several times. Thank you for all the work.
Brad79Chesney January 28, 2017
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.
Jérémy January 28, 2017
Thank you a lot for your work ! I mean it :D
Philippe Villiers January 28, 2017
Thanks a lot for all your work during all those years ! ;)
David Goodwin January 28, 2017
Thanks for all the fish!
Thank you for all your efforts. It’s been appreciated.
Rudra January 30, 2017
Thank you very much for all the effort that you have put in all these years towards providing us with latest php versions.
Tim February 1, 2017
Thank you so much for all the work Guillaume!! :)
benyamin February 3, 2017
thank you for update
JCG February 8, 2017
Thank you very much for all your great work, Guillaume!
Peter Kokot February 10, 2017
Thank you for the greatest Debian PHP repository. It was very useful and responsibly managed. Good luck in the future progress of dotdeb. :)
Aleksey Deryagin February 13, 2017
Guillaume, thank you for your work and great dotdeb! :)
Igor Scabini February 13, 2017
Thank you for your effort and your words!
Joe666 February 14, 2017
Have used your packages for a few years, Thank you very much for everything, best of lucks in all your endeavors
Steven February 16, 2017
I tried a migration from Dotdeb’s PHP7.0 to Sury’s PHP7.1 for a few wordpress sites. All worked like a charm really…
I wrote down my findings on my blog at https://www.groots.be/?p=35
Ricardo February 17, 2017
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?
Presteus Sparkling February 19, 2017
Really ! I’m sad to lost your great work, i have used your repository for a few years.
But thank you for all, and good continuation ;)
qwerty February 20, 2017
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 /
qwerty February 21, 2017
^ same with dotdeb’s php7.0. it is a php7 problem. not cool!