Laravel has always been a framework that isn’t afraid to push forward and Taylor just announced on Twitter that Laravel 5.5 will require PHP 7+.
The 5.5 release is not scheduled until July of 2017 so it’s still months away, however, it’s a good idea to start thinking about upgrading your servers if you are still running PHP 5.x.
Outside of the new developer features PHP 7.0 introduces, it also includes speed improvements that will save your company money. Tumblr recently moved to PHP 7 and they reported:
Almost immediately saw the latency drop by half, and the CPU load on the servers decrease at least 50%, often more. Not only were our servers serving pages twice as fast, they were doing it using half the amount of CPU resources.
If your code base hasn’t started the transition to PHP 7 yet, the official PHP docs has a great migration guide that includes everything you need to check before moving.
For those running Laravel v5 and higher then upgrading should be a relatively painless process since it already runs on the latest PHP version.
