Will Laravel always support the current Debian's PHP version?
Hello,
I saw that the current Laravel's PHP requirements are PHP 5.5 and it uses Ubuntu for its Vagrant box (Homestead).
Is the Homestead environment (ubuntu, php-fpm, etc) the preferred environment for deploying Laravel?
I plan to convince my co-workers to use Laravel for next projects but we will deploy on more "stable" Linux distros like Debian/CentOS, which may not have the newest PHP version.
Currently, Debian 8 uses PHP 5.6, which is sufficient enough to run Laravel, but I am just worrying about the continuity. Will it always support the latest stable Debian's PHP?
Sorry if I'm being overly-paranoid, but that's a worry of mine.
Laravel doesn't really go any one particular distribution's PHP support, so your question can't really be directly answered in that sense. Debian will likely always support a high enough PHP version for Laravel.
There's no "exotic" requirements in Laravel that would make any distribution of Linux not work over the others, so in that sense, I do think you may be on the paranoid side of this.
The only current limitation is if you cannot easily get PHP 5.5+ onto the servers you need to use. This is pretty rare, especially if you are able to add the EPEL repositories to your CentOS/RedHat servers. Debian isn't far enough behind stable PHP versions that I would worry about it.
It seems to (though possibly a co-incidence) go with the version available in the current ubuntu LTS release (so 5.5.9 in 14.04). CentOS/RHEL 6 defaults to 5.3 and 7 to 5.4 - but you can use the official software channels to up the version to 5.6.x (and I guess beyond eventually).
