Migrating Your App from PHP 5.5 to PHP 7

Learn how to migrate your PHP 5.5 application to the PHP 7.2 or PHP 7.3 runtimes on the App Engine standard environment.

Compatibility issues between PHP 5.5 and PHP 7

The official PHP documentation provides information on migrating from different PHP versions:

• Migrating from PHP 5.5.x to PHP 5.6.x
• Migrating from PHP 5.6.x to PHP 7.0.x
• Migrating from PHP 7.0.x to PHP 7.1.x
• Migrating from PHP 7.1.x to PHP 7.2.x
• Migrating from PHP 7.2.x to PHP 7.3.x

Migrating your app.yaml file

You must place a front controller to handle all routing in your application. For more information, see Application startup.

The PHP 7.2 and PHP 7.3 runtimes does not allow the script handler element to be customized. The only valid value is auto, because all traffic is served using the entrypoint command. All non-static URL handlers must include script: auto to deploy successfully.

The behavior of some elements in the app.yaml configuration file has been modified:

Element	Change type	Description
entrypoint	Added	Optionally, use this field to specify the command that will run when your app starts.
threadsafe	Deprecated	All applications are presumed to be threadsafe, meaning an instance can handle multiple requests at the same time.
api_version	Deprecated	Previously required but not needed in the PHP 7.2 and PHP 7.3 runtimes.
application_readable	Deprecated
builtins	Deprecated
libraries	Deprecated	Arbitrary third party dependencies can be installed using a composer.json metadata file.
handlers	Modified	The script field is optional and the only accepted value is auto. Use a web framework (like Laravel, Symfony, Slim, or a similar option) with in-app routing to execute a script when a request hits a specific route The login field is not supported. Use Cloud Identity and Access Management for user management.

If you use of any of the deprecated fields, there will be an error on app deployment.

For more information, see the app.yaml reference.

Reduced runtime restrictions

The PHP 7.2 and PHP 7.3 runtimes have fewer restrictions compared to the PHP 5.5 runtime.

• Install third-party dependencies.
• The runtime includes a full filesystem.
• Create background threads or processes that live beyond the scope of the request while the instance runs.
• Use the Google Cloud Client Library for PHP to integrate apps with other Google Cloud services. For more information, see the Installing the Google Cloud Client Library page.

For more information, see the PHP 7 runtime environment documentation.

Migrating from the App Engine PHP SDK

The PHP 7.2 and PHP 7.3 runtimes do not support the App Engine-specific APIs. Most of the functionality provided by these APIs is now provided by the Cloud SDK client library:

• App Engine Blobstore API support is not provided. Use Cloud Storage through the google/cloud-storage client library. To get started, see the Cloud Storage Client Libraries page.
• Datastore is accessible through the google/cloud-datastore client library. To get started see the Datastore Client Libraries page.
• App Engine Images API support is not provided. Use Cloud Storage through the google/cloud-storage client library. To get started, see the Cloud Storage Client Libraries page.
• App Engine Mail API support is not provided. You will need to use a third-party mail provider such as SendGrid, Mailgun, or Mailjet to send email. All of these services offer APIs to send email from applications. To integrate Mailjet and SendGrid on your App Engine application, see the Sending Emails with Mailjet and Sending Emails with SendGrid documentation.
• App Engine Memcache support is not provided. Instead, use Memorystore for Redis.

• App Engine Modules API is accessible using the google/apiclient library, but is no longer included in an official SDK. Use the environment variables and the App Engine Admin API to obtain information and modify your application's running services:

  Service Information	How to access
  Current service name	GAE_SERVICE environment variable
  Current service version	GAE_VERSION environment variable
  Current instance ID	GAE_INSTANCE environment variable
  Default hostname	Admin API apps.get method
  List of services	Admin API apps.services.list method
  List of versions for a service	Admin API apps.services.versions.list method
  Default version for a service, including any traffic splits	Admin API apps.services.get method
  List of running instances for a version	Admin API apps.services.versions.instances.list method

• App Engine Search API support is not provided. You can host any full-text search database such as ElasticSearch on Compute Engine and access it from your service.

• App Engine Task Queue API will be replaced by Cloud Tasks. You can enqueue tasks from PHP 7 using the Cloud Tasks REST API, RPC API, or the PHP Client library, and you can use a PHP 7.2 or PHP 7.3 App Engine standard service as a Push target. Only push queues are supported.

• Users API support is not provided.

Running your application locally

dev_appserver.py is not supported with the PHP 7.2 and PHP 7.3 runtimes. To test your application and run it locally, you must download and install PHP 7.2 or PHP 7.3 and set up a web server.

For example, start the HTTP server by running the following command:

php -S localhost:8080

Then, view your application in your web browser at http://localhost:8080.