After the release of Drupal 9, members of the Drupal community expressed their desire to know more about the platform requirements for Drupal 9 prior to its release. It therefore became a goal to finalise the platform requirements for Drupal 10 as soon as possible.
For those who have been following the Drupal 10 development, here's an update on the platform requirements for Drupal 10 and an official calendar for when the final decisions will be made: A minimum of five months prior to Drupal 10.0.0's release, the platform requirements for the Drupal 10 platform will be finalised.
What's the reason for such a rapid pace?
When it comes to Drupal 9, Symfony 4 is its most important dependency. This software will be deprecated in November 2023. After November 2023, Symfony 4's security flaws will not be fixed. Symfony 5 (or later) must be adopted by Drupal by November 2023, and Drupal 9 must be retired by then.
All Drupal 9 users must update to Drupal 10 by November 2023 in order to remain secure. We aim to release Drupal 10 in June 2022 so that site owners have at least a year to migrate from Drupal 9 to Drupal 10.
Symfony 4 will be deprecated in November 2023, which means that Drupal 10 will be released in June 2022.
Drupal 10 prerequisites
Many people participated in the Drupal community poll regarding the availability of PHP 8.0 and 8.1.
The Symfony framework has stated that Symfony 6.1 requires PHP 8.1 since our last publication. Symfony 6 is used in Drupal 10, which necessitates the usage of PHP 8.1.
As a result of requiring PHP 8.1 immediately, we'll be able to deliver Drupal 10 with better long-term stability and predictability.
In order to give the greatest possible support for the adoption of PHP 8.1, we have decided to leave our community survey open for as long as possible to collect information on how sites in our ecosystem are hosted and what PHP versions are accessible to them. Whether you haven't done so already, please let us know if your sites and projects are using PHP 8.0 or 8.1.
Even while PHP 8.0 will be supported by the PHP project until November 2023, Drupal 10 will be supported for many more years than PHP 8. Some of Drupal's Composer dependencies may stop supporting PHP 8.0 after November 2023. (even though security patches for PHP 8.0 itself may still be available from other organisations like Linux distributions).
While it is not necessary for Drupal 10.0.0 at this time, PHP 8.1 may be required in a future Drupal 10 minor version. During the Drupal 10 and future release cycles, we will be treating end-of-life PHP versions in our policy issue.
Requirements for the database server
Finalised database server requirements for Drupal 10 may be found in the Database server requirements documentation.
Requirements for a website's hosting service
Drupal 9 and 10 have the same web server requirements.
When will Drupal 10 be released?
A significant Drupal upgrade from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9 was the simplest in over a decade. It is anticipated that the following version will go a similar path. Drupal 10 is expected to be launched in August 2022, with a backup release date of December 2022. In order to prepare for this upgrade, the same tools and techniques were used in the prior one.
Why can't I use PHP 8.1 on my webserver or hosting provider?
You should open a support request if your web server doesn't support the latest version of PHP. PHP 8.1's change record includes sample messages and details on which PHP versions are supported by which Linux distributions.
Is upgrading to Drupal 10 going to be simple?
It will be straightforward, yes.
In fact, new features for Drupal 10 are being incorporated into earlier versions of Drupal. As a result, module developers will have immediate access to any new APIs. As we progress, we will deprecate older features while maintaining backwards compatibility. We will remove all deprecated code from Drupal 10 when it is ready for public release. The removal of deprecated code breaks backwards compatibility, but because module developers had the opportunity to stay up to date with API changes, the conversion to Drupal 10 should be quite straightforward.
To put things in perspective, consider the following: Drupal 10 is the last version of Drupal 9, however it does not have any deprecations. No major or unexpected modifications are allowed because of this.
95 out of the top 100 contributed modules were available when Drupal 9.0.0 was published as a result of this method. Due to Drupal 9's success, we're confident in this approach to upgrades and anticipate future version to follow the same path.