PHP 7.2: Add Extension By Name

There is a good list of things that are being deprecated, and a change to allow for type widening, but compared to PHP 7.0 and PHP 7.2, PHP 7.2 is positively a yawner. This makes writing articles about the new hotness coming down the pipe a bit difficult. Even so, there are a couple of things that are worth noting in PHP 7.2 One of them is “PHP RFC: Allow loading extensions by name”.

The way PHP handles loading extensions is absolutely fine, if you are a Linux system admin. Honestly, there was a time when most of us who managed PHP on a server where. The extension= lines in a php.ini require that you know the exact name of the extension. That name is different on Windows severs than on Linux servers. Even though the majority of PHP deployments are still on some variant of Unix, not all are.

So, to resolve this issue for the sake of the sanity of DevOps teams everywhere, PHP 7.2 will allow extensions to be loaded by name in addition to file name.

So now, all of these will be acceptable:

1 2 3 4

extension=bz extension=php_bz2.dll extension=bz2.so extension=bz2.sl

The last one being the proper file name on an HP-UX system.

This also means that there is one less difference between Windows and *nix php.ii files. Those of us who swap between the two will be greatly relieved.