We’re happy to announce we now officially support PHP 8.1 on our Linux Hosting Platform. PHP 8.1 is the latest 8.x series releases and comes with many outstanding improvements and new features.

• Enumerations
• Readonly properties
• Fibers
• Pure Intersection Types
• never return type
• First-class Callable Syntax
• “final” modifier for class constants
• New fsync and fdatasync functions
• New array_is_list function
• Explicit Octal numeral notation
• And more

PHP 8.1 also like all previous releases contains performance improvements which depending on your application may be noticeable. We however highly recommend checking your applications requirements and then testing using our PHP version control to make sure your application is PHP 8.1 compatible.

To enable PHP 8.1 all you need to do is login to  your Plesk control panel go to PHP Settings and locate ‘PHP Support (PHP Version)’. On the ‘Select PHP Support Version’ you’ll select PHP 8.1 from the drop down and set it as your current PHP version. Then choose whether to run PHP as a FastCGI Application or an FPM Application served by Apache or NGINX. After this you’ll be able to manage extensions as you would for any PHP version we offer and your entire account will use PHP 8.1. At this moment in time many extensions such as Ioncube are not available in PHP 8.1 but will become available once a stable version is available.  WordPress 5.9.3 is compatible with PHP 8.1, however, many themes or plugins may not be yet. You can test using our staging environment by cloning our WordPress website in the Plesk control panel.