Yii 2.2

[bizley]

Let's talk about possibility to bump Yii to 2.1 (2.2).

[bizley]

I would gladly help doing this although with my current work and duties I will not be able to pull it in reasonable time. Some help is needed definitely.

The things to consider are (among others of course):

• the minimum PHP version
• versioning (obviously v3 is taken so again no semver here)
• continuing the support of Yii 2.0

[tomaszkane]

IMHO as @schmunk42 says: https://packagist.org/packages/yiisoft/yii2/php-stats PHP 5.4 is 0.0 - 0.1% installations - so (almost) no one needs support this version.
For me resonable minimum is last "7" branch: 7.4.

[lucaswitch]

@tomaszkane Yii capability of support so many php versions is actually awesome but i think it's time to move the minimum php version to 7.x, since that were so many good php changes.

[tomaszkane]

@lucaswitch Yii 2.2 already exist with PHP 8.1 as minimum version.

yii2/framework/composer.json

Line 66 in 3587dfb

"php": ">=8.1",

[lesha724]

#19255

[lesha724]

#19367

[My6UoT9]

I would like to see Yii2 being in sync with supported PHP versions, so that would be 8,1+
edit: actually php 8.0 since that is suported till end of year. https://www.php.net/supported-versions.php

[samdark]

What do you mean by "in sync"?

[xepozz]

I'd suggest to make a research and try to reuse Yii3 packages instead of Yii2 ones if it possible: some helpers, adapters for validators and etc.
I thought about that many times. Looks possible if we do it step by step.

[lesha724]

Yii3 packages has requirements php8.0 or higher

[tomaszkane]

Yii3 packages require policy is (AFAIK) "actually active/supported PHP version".

[xepozz]

It's not a problem to add BC layer for PHP 7.4 and fix dependencies.

[samdark]

That's a good thing to do and I've tried that already on several projects. Works wonders. But you have to go 8.1 first.

[rob006]

Please, do no use 2.1 as version, pick 2.2 instead - there was already a lot of fuss with 2.1, which had some planned features (and some of them implemented), then renamed to 3.0, and then abandoned. It will be so confusing is someone will try to search about 2.1 and find contradicting information.

IMO it is very similar situation as with PHP 6.

[samdark]

Makes sense. Thanks.

[razvanphp]

Yii3 abandoned?!

[tomaszkane]

No. Why?

[razvanphp]

That’s how it sounded from the text above, but I guess what Rob meant was that 2.1 was abandoned.

[samdark]

Yes. 2.1 was abandoned back then. 2.2 is in preparation stage. Yii3 packages are mostly released along with docs. The guide and the rest of packages are in development. I'm running a few production instances with Yii3 components used.

[schmunk42]

Actually Yii2 is in code freeze state - but the reality is different :)

the minimum PHP version

I'd advocate for 8.1 - I upgraded a lot of projects in the past months and while upgrading to 8.0 is rather easy, 8.1 and 8.2 raises a lot more of issues. So to avoid to be stuck inbetween versions, do the jump now to an active stable version.
Users should be advised to require "2.0.x" or add conflict < Yii 2.2 for exisiting projects to avoid breaks.

continuing the support of Yii 2.0

If there's a Yii 2.2 - for 2.0 CVEs and Bugs ONLY, see first line ;)

2.2 has to remain API compatible with 2.0.

[schmunk42]

[...] drop old/ugly code for < 7.4

Some changes which come to my mind

• ::class() vs ::className (was introduced in 5.5)
• Scalar type declarations (7.0) not sure if we want this though
• Null coalescing operator (7.0)

More stuff: https://web.archive.org/web/20201205203503/https://www.php.net/manual/en/appendices.php

But all of those are syntatic sugar in the core. Every change needs to be tested thoroughly, there were already esoteric issues with stuff like that.

BTW, in my company several projects on Yii2 runs on PHP 8.0.

In mine too and upgrading to 8.0 was rather easy, but 8.1 and even more 8.2 were painful.

[mtangoo]

In our company we are running on 8.1 with no issues. 8.2 is rather a problem. We are waiting for a pending PR to be merged

[rhertogh]

I would also advocate for PHP 8.1. It's already supported in Yii 2.0, so anyone who need a lower PHP version can stay on that version and step by step transition to PHP 8.1. From there they could make the switch to Yii 2.2 if they want.

[nd4c]

Just a note. I currently have an e-commerce/MIS site with an extensive backend (the MIS part) that runs on PHP 8.3. I've extended some Yii classes to add in functionality and may have adjusted some things there to help with 8.3 - not sure right now - a lot of the code was written originally for Yii1 and has gone through a lot of upgrades.

I remember having some issues during php upgrades over the years - I'd vote for being more cutting edge and support at least 8.1. PHP's version path moves rather quickly. (https://www.php.net/supported-versions.php) Seriously, some of the posts here are over a year old - PHP has already EOL'd at least one if not two versions since this conversation started. ;-)

[schmunk42]

Now, I'd go with 8.3 - 8.2 active support ends in 1 month.

[samdark]

Stats

• hhvm and PHP 5 are safe to drop support for.
• pre-7.4 versions are 19% together and that is signficiant. I wonder if these are using older Yii2 versions as well but we don't have the stats.
• 7.4 is the most popular version despite it being EOL-ed.

The tendency towards PHP 8 is there. It went to 50% in ~3 years.

Resources

1. Focus of current team is Yii3 so we can't pull big upgrade w/o extra funding. You can see it with PHP 8.2 support. It goes too slow while, in reality, that's a one-man job for ~1 week + fixing edge cases (at least that was the case with Yii 1.1 that I did initially).
2. Community effort would definitely help but that still requires time to review/fix things. See point 1.

Thoughts

• Dropping PHP 5 could be done in regular minor version. Composer will just install older version with matching constraint. That's tedious task but pretty much doable. That would help us a bit maintenence-wise.
• Adding types everywhere isn't going to play well with AR and is a huge effort. Way bigger than adding 8.2 support that is going really slow now.
• We can potentially drop PHP 7 w/o adding types and release Yii 2.2 along with providing a good upgrade guide and to ease maintenance significantly and overall pushing community to up to date versions.

[bizley]

I'm thinking right now about adding the guards in public/protected methods that will check the types of provided arguments and throw InvalidArgumentExc. This is is a bit of overhead but I think it's still ok-ish. This could be dropped when we reach min. PHP version with union types (still checking for array elements types though).

By looking at the stats I think it's safe to set min. PHP to 7.2 since older versions are 5.3% although based on general consensus it would be better to stick to 7.4.

[samdark]

@bizley that's even more work than adding types right away.

[bizley]

Hm, yes, maybe I would like to have more that we can do. It would make our lives simpler. But you are right.

[bizley]

As for the Yii 2.0 maintenance I would drop adding "enhancements" in total. Only security fixes and compatibility layer (which is problematic anyway).

[samdark]

Yes. That was an idea of "code freeze" years back...

[terabytesoftw]

This has turned into a snowball, the more versions of PHP are released, the more difficult it will be to have compatibility, so i think it should be done, with a minimum version of at least 8.0 or 8.1, whoever uses previous versions will stay at 2.0.

[bizley]

This is just changing the starting point of supporting the previous versions. PHP rather won't stop at 8.3.

[erickskrauch]

My vote is also for dropping old PHP versions.
But there is also a solution by using Rector with downgrade rules:
https://github.com/rectorphp/rector-downgrade-php

[samdark]

Some reasons on why people don't switch to PHP 8: https://twitter.com/sam_dark/status/1656549413282611200

[schmunk42]

Some of the extensions in yii2 I rely on only work on 7.4 unfortunately :(

The biggest issue IMHO, when I see the current state how regularly extensions are maintained.

[terabytesoftw]

We could do the following.

• Create branch 2.2.
• Upload the minimum version of PHP to the framework and oficial extensions according to agreement.
• Pass the rector to all framework code and official extensions.
• Upload the version of PHPUNIT without any patch, and fix the tests, without even touching the code.

[rustamwin]

Is there any (major) plan to do in 2.2?

[samdark]

No.

[rhertogh]

In the discussion about which PHP version should be the minimum for Yii 2.2 the argument of current usage by PHP version is brought up a lot. But in my opinion there is a big flaw in that reasoning, it's missing the user needs. I think the current users can be grouped in 3 groups:

1. Users that want to move forward.
   • Willing to upgrade to Yii 2.2
   • Use a recent PHP version (>= 8.1)
2. Users that are happy to stay where they are.
   • Are OK with staying on Yii 2.0
   • Probably are using an older PHP version (e.g. 7.4)
3. Users that would want to use Yii 2.2 but can't.
   • Would like to upgrade to Yii 2.2
   • Stuck on an older PHP version (e.g. 7.4)

So my argument is that even a lot of the current Yii 2 installs are on PHP < 8.1 they are most likely in group 2 (happy to stay). Therefore the question should be: Should group 1 be hold back by group 3?
Since I don't think group 3 makes up a significant percentage I would argue that Yii 2.2 should focus on group 1 and use PHP 8.1 as the minimum version.

[smirnov-e]

Group 2, in my opinion, are so fine that they don't run composer upgrade and their code is not in active development anyway. So, as users of Yii 2.2, they can be considered inexistent.

My point is that most installs with old PHP > 7, < 8 should be from group 3 that want to upgrade, but can't do this. And this group should be rather large.

[nd4c]

On the symfony site, there is a page to help with installing the framework and has some technical requirements:
https://symfony.com/doc/current/setup.html#technical-requirements

And I quote from that page:
Technical Requirements
Before creating your first Symfony application you must: Install PHP 8.2 or higher...

We need to move on. My guess (and experience) is that the hardest part to upgrading to a new PHP version is the underlying framework and libraries - not the project code. That's "relatively easy" to correct. I believe we need to start at the cutting edge and then keep moving forward.

[nd4c]

Just a comment on my previous post. By "relatively easy" I mean that the programmers should be able to upgrade their own project. Most IDE's can help with this. And then just run your test suite - you'll find out where to fix it.

However, the programmers have very little control over the framework and the libraries. Typically libararies have versions to help with supporting php versioning. So Yii2.0 could support older php and Yii2.2 could support 8.2. Yii2.2.2 (or something) could support 8.3, etc.

Versioning is typically used for Security, Bug and Feature changes. Support for various PHP versions should be considered as botha Security and Feature change.

[rustamwin]

It would be nice to cover the codebase with psalm.

[samdark]

Thought about it more. Current team doesn't have time to do it in a reasonable time but I see positive feedback about the idea itself. Therefore, I think we can form dedicated Yii2 team from community members who are willing to move it forward.

So if you want to be in this new team, let me know.

[mtangoo]

@themikem you can read 8.2 progress and needed help in 8.2 PRs but especially #19749

[themikem]

Ah okay, had the impression from discussions above that there was still outstanding work to do there to get even the basic code working, but it looks like its more just updating to 8.1 language features as a baseline at this point now that the referenced PR is merged?

(Though looking at 8.2 might also make sense given 8.1 is <6 months from end of active support...?)

[mtangoo]

8.2 still have some outstanding issues referenced in the merged PR and elsewhere.
Surely any help to get them ironed is welcome!

[machour]

I'll be glad to resume my duties here, if there's a clear plan for what needs to be done. I'll be available at the end of July.

[samdark]

@machour added you back. No clear plan yet. @terabytesoftw is doing a rough draft and fixing tests to run smooth. After that is done, we can decide on the scope and distribute tasks.

[lourdas]

I read this thread and I'm a bit puzzled. What's the point of Yii 2.2? Just to raise the minimum PHP version and just make sure it works? Ok, so, what then?

In my organization, we started writing a webapp from scratch back in late 2011. We used Yii 1.1 at that time. The application is elections specific, so, it's not used all the time, but before and after the elections here in my country. The last time it was used was last June (12 years later) and it run without any issues in PHP 8.0. I tested it a bit with 8.1 and it seems to work fine too. Over the course of the years, the application has grown to several controllers and modules and it will take many months to convert it to Yii 2.0, or even more to another framework. So, unless something big happens, the application will stay in Yii 1.1 forever. Of course, since I know that it will run under 8.0 or 8.1, I can use many newer PHP features in my code and that's fine.

What's my point? If 2.2 is just about raising the minimum PHP version without major code refactorings in the framework itself, IMHO it's not a very good idea for a 2.2 branch. Just focus on the existing 2.0 branch, accept fixes for 8.1.x or 8.2.x and all will be good.

Please correct me if I misunderstood something.

[lourdas]

Maybe I'm missing something that I don't get, but doesn't raising the minimum version mean that you must actually install a newer version of PHP so that the code runs? In this case, you should probably expect deprecations or even removals (if some eg. functions were already deprecated in the current PHP version that you didn't happen to be aware of), leading to non-working code.

[rob006]

You don't need to install latest version of framework. If you're using old PHP you can stick to Yii 2.0.49, since you don't need compatibility with PHP 8+. Yii 2.0.49 could be some kind of LTS with security fixes only.

[OndrejVasicek]

But staying in 2.0.49 would cut me from bugfixes in 51,52, etc, wouldn't it? Or you mean that that 2.0.49 would get fixes in 2.0.49.1, 2.0.49.2 etc? It sounds like very crazy versioning.

[tomaszkane]

It should be like now:

• 2.0.49
• 2.0.50
• 2.0.51...

and new branch/line:

• 2.2.0
• 2.2.1
• 2.2.2...

[rob006]

But staying in 2.0.49 would cut me from bugfixes in 51,52, etc, wouldn't it?

Yes, But you would need to stay on 2.0.49 only if you want to stay on PHP 7.2 or lower.

[dneprovec]

So, this discussion came to nothing?

No chance to have a bit more modern Yii2 with which we are so familiar with?
A lot of good extensions and our personal code are wasted and cannot be used in new projects.

Guys , you need to be "not lying" about such things.
Starting fake discussions , saw it in Samdark telegram, and then "you will have to do it yourself".

If your work with Yii3 came to fault, it would be reasonable to accept this reality and think about what Yii framework people could use in the current time.

[bizley]

WDYM?

[smirnov-e]

Well, it was talk about possibility. Not rock hard roadmap.
And this talk didn't came to nothing, as I see: #19955 (yes, it's just branch update, but it displays at least some interest from developers).

[terabytesoftw]

This branch will move forward, we will eliminate all the deprecations, and I will make some improvements, trying to break the code as little as possible.

[schmunk42]

This branch will move forward, we will eliminate all the deprecations, and I will make some improvements, trying to break the code as little as possible.

Sounds good to me.

[terabytesoftw]

Hi, here is the repository for app-basic for Yii2, which contains:

1.- Vertical Slices design.
2.- Toggle for color mode (auto, dark, light), you can implement more colors in Bootstrap5.
3.- 100% code coverage.
4.- Static analysis with PHPStan.
5.- Check dependencies using composer-require-checker.
6.- Dependency injection usage.
7.- Utilizes Yii2 Branch 2.2, which requires at least PHP 8.1 and has no deprecated features.

You can find the repository here: https://github.com/yii2-extensions/app-basic

[terabytesoftw]

Hi, Web Application Advanced:

1️⃣ Vertical Slices design 📐
2️⃣ Color mode toggle (auto, dark, light) 🌗
3️⃣ 100% code coverage 📊
4️⃣ Static analysis with PHPStan Level 5 🕵️
5️⃣ Composer-require-checker for dependencies 🧩
6️⃣ Dependency injection usage 📥
7️⃣ Yii2 Branch 2.2, PHP 8.1+ 🐘
8️⃣ Example of Definitions & Singletons in Configuration 🛠️
9️⃣ yiisoft/config style Yii3 (entry scripts backend, console, frontend) 🧰

You can find the repository here: https://github.com/yii2-extensions/app-advanced

[razvanphp]

Can we still talk about features/roadmap for 2.2 here?

Besides the PHP upgrade, the most painful thing for me with yii2 is related to DevOps, deployment in particular: the AssetManager needs to be refactored in a way to make stateless deployments possible, in docker containers, specifically.

Not sure what is the best way, but one idea I tried is mikk150/yii2-asset-manager-flysystem, or maybe we should include a command that publishes all assets from CLI.

I'm willing to work on this after we brainstorm ideas. Thank you!

[mtangoo]

@razvanphp Yes sure. one of those was something to do with assets management. @terabytesoftw was leading on that.
Can you open new discussion on how you want Yii2.2 to work with assets so that we can have full discussion there?

[razvanphp]

a new discussion thread? Do we expect such a big debate? not sure if I have much more to add than the two suggestions above.

[mtangoo]

I do not know how long or short it will be. But imagine every single feature discussed in this one thread. It will be messy.
As of the suggestions, they need to be looked at from different angles, pros and cons discussed, PR made may be et al.
All that is not as easy as you seem to suggest.

[mtangoo]

@razvanphp feel free to share your ideas at #20164

[nd4c]

This conversation seems to have dwindled. I realize the world keeps us all very busy, and as far as Yii2 goes, I find that it still works very well. It's just a little old and some of the coding practices have changed.

I'd like to share some thoughts. Maybe it will help. Please forgive me if I offend anyone (I tend to do that...)

There are a lot of frameworks out there, some with very impressive backing. But Yii2 has always been near the top (and some would say at the top) for years. It's an impressive framework. But why?

Other than the great coding and thought that went into it, it offers some compelling advantages:

[ ] It is easy to roll out a new project with just about everything you needed to support a robust website: MCV, Security, Auth, Database, Ajax, an easy templating systems (Views), etc.
[ ] It has an impressive testing framework.
[ ] It is very easy to adjust and re-organize the code to how you want it.
and the list goes on.

Yii3 on the other hand is cutting edge, uses the latest coding patterns and is extremely moldable. I just find it hard to start up a new project. There are way too many decisions to make and some of the info on how to add functionality is difficult to find and/or understand. In short there is an incredibly large learning curve. This is very different from Yii2.

Laravel is more popular than Symfony for one simple reason: It's easy to get started and has a smaller learning curve. Both are impressive frameworks and are very similar to Yii3 in using the latest modular coding patterns - they are SOLID. With Laravel you can start a new project and add in basic security (auth) with just a couple of commands. Symfony, on the other hand, has a BOOK to describe how to do it. Phew! (And in the book the author makes all kinds of decisions for you - kind of defeating the foundation of the framework.)

I propose that Yii2.2 be simply a prefactored, ready-to-go, implementation for Yii3. And, like Yii2, with it's basic and advanced versions, offer a selection of "Project Types".

To be continued...?

[nd4c]

a continuation...

I'm sometimes called a full-stack programmer. I sometimes called a lot of bad things as well, but, anyway...

I remember when Centos first came out and it was a Godsend! So stable! Before that it was a constant battle to update the servers. You always had to have a test server to try out anything before updating a production server. Just the server, never mind the code.

And the same with PHP. Trying to mix and match various libraries was a nightmore! Even with PEAR. Then along came Composer! Another Godsend!

And many years ago I'd written several website with just PHP - no libraries. In fact, the one time I used a library - the site got hacked because of a hole in the library and brought down the server - crash! Then along came PHP Frameworks! Yes, another Godsend!

My point? What we need as programmers is solid supporting infrastructure. The less we have to worry about it the better.

That's why I went with Yii 1. It gave a solid foundation for my websites, and I could spend most of my time writing the business logic and having fun with front end layout. Very nice! Yii2 was even better. (Well, the migration from Yii1 to Yii2 was intense - but worth it.)

So I'd like to recommend that we de-emphasize the modularity of Yii3 and wrap it up a bit with "ready to run" implementations. It will always be modular. But as programmers I think we'd like something a little more ready to go for most websites.

Symfony is fantastic, but having to go through a whole Book just to get a robust working website is too much. I'd like to hope that Yii3 would not require such a book...