PHP 8.3 or 8.4?

This support forum board is for support questions relating to Nagios XI, our flagship commercial network monitoring solution.
tim620
Posts: 16
Joined: Tue May 07, 2019 1:37 pm

PHP 8.3 or 8.4?

Post by tim620 »

Are PHP 8.3 and 8.4 compatible or supported with Nagios XI? Active support for 8.1 ended a year ago. We would like to upgrade to PHP 8.3 or 8.4 (8.4 just came out last month).

There are instructions out there for upgrading to PHP 7 for Nagios XI, But nothing about upgrading to PHP 8, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, or 8.4. And not word if it is compatible with Nagios XI or supported.

At the very least, can you tell me if PHP 8.3 and 8.4 are supported with the latest versions of Nagios XI?

In order to keep up with security compliance, we need to be on a supported version of PHP. Nagios doesn't seem to care about supported versions of PHP.
jsimon
Posts: 317
Joined: Wed Aug 23, 2023 11:27 am

Re: PHP 8.3 or 8.4?

Post by jsimon »

Hi @tim620,

Nagios XI works with PHP 8, up to version 8.3. Nagios policy for this is that we support the PHP version that ships with supported distros of Linux.
tim620
Posts: 16
Joined: Tue May 07, 2019 1:37 pm

Re: PHP 8.3 or 8.4?

Post by tim620 »

Thanks for confirming that Nagios XI works with PHP 8.3. Will my Nagios XI be supported if I upgrade PHP to 8.3?

...and yes, I realize that I need to use the "remi-" repos for PHP 8.3.

The problem with the "Nagios policy" is that the Linux distros themselves, do not always come with supported versions of PHP.
jsimon
Posts: 317
Joined: Wed Aug 23, 2023 11:27 am

Re: PHP 8.3 or 8.4?

Post by jsimon »

Nagios does not support the upgrade process for PHP, however doing this yourself will not remove your ability to obtain support for your Nagios XI installation.

In the event that errors related to the upgrade occur, our official support stance would be to advise a fresh installation on an up to date Linux distro that ships with a version of PHP that meets your security needs, and perform a migration to move your data and configuration over.
DoubleDoubleA
Posts: 199
Joined: Thu Feb 09, 2017 5:07 pm

Re: PHP 8.3 or 8.4?

Post by DoubleDoubleA »

Hi @tim620,

If you upgrade an XI system to php 8.3 on RHEL 9, which supports up to php 8.2 (which still has two years until EOL), then no, that is not supported. Ubuntu 24 will get you to 8.3. I don't know that any distro officially supports 8.4 yet. If your distro doesn't support a supported version of php, it might be time to consider upgrading distros.

Aaron
tim620
Posts: 16
Joined: Tue May 07, 2019 1:37 pm

Re: PHP 8.3 or 8.4?

Post by tim620 »

@DoubleDoubleA

You are right. I should have checked before I wrote about the "unsupported PHP". We are currently running our Nagios XI on Oracle Linux 9 and our Nagios Log servers on Oracle Linux 8. I just checked and both versions now come with PHP 8.2. At some point we switched to the "remi" repos for PHP, because the included PHP wasn't new enough. But, that might have been last year, prior to migrating from CentOS 7 to Oracle Linux 9. We are still using the "remi" repos for PHP.
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jmichaelson
Posts: 335
Joined: Wed Aug 23, 2023 1:02 pm

Re: PHP 8.3 or 8.4?

Post by jmichaelson »

Even at that, I'd still recommend using the OS supported PHP versions as opposed to the remi repository versions if you're able. While those repos may work perfectly well (for instance, the Sury repos for Debian are maintained by the package manager responsible for the official Debian packages), they have been known to cause other headaches at times, particularly after a long chain of upgrades. See, for example this post: viewtopic.php?t=75974.
Please let us know if you have any other questions or concerns.

-Jason
sgardil
Posts: 326
Joined: Wed Aug 09, 2023 9:58 am

Re: PHP 8.3 or 8.4?

Post by sgardil »

To add a little onto what jmichaelson said, while the remi may work it also tends to create some issues when getting support for issues. We tend to operate under the assumption that it is a normal install with unaltered packages so we may not be able to find the issue that you are having. Also unless told else wise that there has been some changes, we usually have no way to know so it makes it more difficult to help trouble shoot issues.
tim620
Posts: 16
Joined: Tue May 07, 2019 1:37 pm

Re: PHP 8.3 or 8.4?

Post by tim620 »

Thanks. I think we didn't realize we could change the default PHP modules with the standard OS modules, so we went down the road of the "remi" repos. Because we thought the standard OS repo only had an old version of PHP.

We know better now, but we have been using "remi" for a long time. Backing out and installing the OS verisons of PHP is going to take a little work and testing.

Thanks.
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jmichaelson
Posts: 335
Joined: Wed Aug 23, 2023 1:02 pm

Re: PHP 8.3 or 8.4?

Post by jmichaelson »

I am curious if the remi repositories allow you to install multiple versions of PHP simultaneously as can be done on Debian/Ubuntu systems. You may be able to install both the default PHP concurrently with the one from Remi, update the alternatives for it and test. If everything works, remove the Remi version and the relevant repositories.
Please let us know if you have any other questions or concerns.

-Jason
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