December 10, 2015 Javier Eguiluz

The Symfony Release Process is arguably one of the best selling points of the Symfony project. Thanks to our predictable and transparent process, companies can plan years in ahead their Symfony integration.

The recent launch of Symfony 2.8, which will be the last minor version of the 2.x branch, made us think about further tweaks in the release process. That's why during his past SymfonyCon Paris 2015 keynote, Fabien Potencier announced the new Symfony release process.

These are the main changes introduced starting from 3.0 version:

Each major version (3.x, 4.x) will publish five minor versions (X.0, X.1, X.2, X.3 and X.4).

All minor versions are standard versions (8 months of support) except the last one (X.4) which is a long term support version (36 months of support).

(8 months of support) except the last one (X.4) which is a (36 months of support). Major versions are released at the same time of the last minor version of the previous branch (e.g. 4.0.0 and 3.4.0 are released simultaneously).

Thanks to our strict deprecation policy this release process is possible and ensures a smooth upgrade between different Symfony versions.

This new process means that Symfony 4 will be released on November 2017. Check out the details of any past, present or future Symfony version in our updated Symfony version checker. You can also subscribe for free to our notification service to receive an email announcing each Symfony release.