Dotdeb is a one-man project that is providing up-to-date PHP packages for more than 14 years now, and I’m very proud and grateful for the community that gathered around it.

From the start, my goal has been to sustain the effort of backporting packages with reliability and compatibility with stock Debian distributions in mind. People got that and have been trusting in Dotdeb and deploying it on thousands of development and production stacks. Thank you very much for that! I mean it.

But it’s 2017 now and I’m afraid to say that – for personal and professional reasons – my focus has shifted a bit off the PHP ecosystem. Since PHP 7.0 has been released, I’m struggling with publishing PHP packages with added value. I mostly did just backports from Debian Sid, without any major changes or contributions. It has been a very frustrating situation for everyone: for me, for Dotdeb users; and for Debian maintainers who now provide either official Debian backports or Debian Personal Archives (DPA).

Because it makes no sense to duplicate the effort any longer, and as long as such viable alternatives exist, Dotdeb won’t provide any package of PHP 7.1 and later.

If you want to install PHP 7.1+ on your machine or just seamlessly upgrade it, you should definitely take a look at deb.sury.org. That’s where Ondřej Surý publishes PHP packages for

Debian and Ubuntu,

on i386, amd64 and even armhf and arm64 architectures!

He is the official Debian maintainer of the core PHP packages (+ many other PHP modules) and he does a great job providing everything you need to run recent versions of PHP. Depending on the Debian backports team’s decision, these packages could even be available on jessie-backports.

Thanks again for trusting and using Dotdeb all these years for your PHP packages.

Please note that: