Shall You Upgrade to the PHP 8.2.2 Version that Was Just Released

Why PHP Core Developers Release Minor Versions like PHP 8.2.2

Every new release improves some features. Usually, some features were not tested in all use cases.

When a new release is published, it goes through much more testing of real-world applications.

That is when minor issues are detected. Therefore core developers release new minor releases to make PHP even more stable.

What Are the Most Important Fixes of PHP 8.2.2

Here is a list of PHP extensions that were fixed in PHP 8.2.2 the extension purposes:

- Core: This is the central core language functions and classes implementation

- fpm: This is the handler of PHP requests when PHP is setup to run using the FastCGI Process Manager

- hash: This is the implementation of PHP hashing functions

- ldap: This is the extension to access LDAP servers

- opcache: This is the extension to cache PHP scripts the first time they are executed, so next time, they can run faster

- Phar: This is the extension that accesses PHAR archives that can contain sets of PHP scripts and other files

- phpdbg: This is an extension that implements the DBG protocol used by some PHP debuggers

- posix: This is the extensions that implement functions specific to POSIX-compliant systems like Linux

- random: This is the extension that implements random data generation

- standard: This is the base implementation of functions of the PHP language

- xmlwriter: This is an extension to generate XML documents

How Can You Decide If You Should Upgrade to PHP 8.2.2.

First you need to check if you are running PHP 8.2 already. If you use PHP 8.2.2, you should consider to upgrade immediately.

Keep in mind that every new release may fix previous issues in PHP. It may also introduce new issues.

So you should always perform tests before upgrading if you have control over the language version that you use on your servers.

If you have that control you should check next if your code uses any of the PHP extensions mentioned in the list above.

To make that check you can use the phpinfo or the get_loaded_extensions functions.

<?php

$affected = array(
   'Core',
   'hash',
   'standard',
   'Phar',
   'posix',
   'xmlwriter',
   'random',
   'ldap',
   'fpm',
   'opcache',
   'phpdbg',
);

$extensions = get_loaded_extensions();

$total_extensions_affected = 0;
foreach($extensions as $extension)
{
    if(in_array($extension, $affected))
    {
        echo 'The affected extension ', $extension, ' is loaded in your PHP environment', "\n";
        $total_extensions_affected++;
    }
}
echo 'There were ', $total_extensions_affected, ' affected in this new release', "\n";

if($total_extensions_affected > 0)
     echo 'Consider upgrading your PHP version after you test your code with the new version.', "\n";
else
    echo 'It may not be worth upgradding your code to the new version.', "\n";

If you use an older PHP versions, you should be more careful because some new major versions may deprecate is discontinue old functions.

In that case, I suggest that you try the new version for a while in the development environment that you use to work on your application, besides running as many tests as possible in your application.