Does your company still use PHP 5.6? Homestead Fifty Six is a development environment for PHP 5.6 and 7.0 by Homestead maintainer Joe Ferguson.
Last week Joe announced the project on his blog:
The most recent major release of Homestead dropped support for PHP 5.6 and 7.0. While these PHP versions are end of life and will no longer be receiving updates, some developers still need access to these tools. You can certainly use and old version of Homestead but at some point the base box will just be too far out of date and things will start breaking. The solution to this problem is for me to continue to maintain a PHP 5.6, 7.x version of Homestead as a project I’m calling “ Homestead Fifty Six “. This project will be based directly off Laravel Homestead but will not be 100% compatible.
Homestead Fifty Six initially has two offerings:
- $10 per month for access to the packages
- $15/month for access to packages as well as priority support for any help you may need getting the project working.
With the release of PHP 7.3, the PHP team dropped official support for EOL versions, including versions 5.6 and 7.0. Homestead also dropped support for these versions, which makes perfect sense and reduces the maintenance burden of Homestead.
While users are encouraged to update to new stable releases of PHP, sometimes it’s not so cut and dried in reality. Projects like Homestead Fifty Six aim to bridge that gap and provide access to these tools.
You can read Joe’s full announcement for the full details, including links to purchase access to Homestead Fifty Six.
