Horde on PHP 8.1 and Composer: Update

Regular readers of this blog and many other are aware that PHP 7.4 will stop receiving security updates when PHP 8.2 comes out in November. This has made many horde admins question if they can continue to run Horde. Some events in life have made progress slower than originally planned. So where are we?

Confirmed running under PHP 8.1 and composer 2.4

• horde/base in Browser
• essential Horde Base CLI tools like horde-db-migrate and hordectl
• horde/base portal blocks and admin area
• horde/components developer tool
• horde/turba Addressbook App Reading and writing contacts in the UI
• horde/mnemo Notes App UI and webdav
• horde/nag Tasks Apps UI, webdav, caldav
• horde/kronolith Calendar App UI, webdav, CalDAV
• horde/passwd Password App – Changing passwords worked with the hordeauth driver
• horde/gollem File Manager App – very limited testing so far
• horde/imp Webmail – very limited testing.

I run on a setup with openssl3 and a recent mariadb against dovecot and postfix. You can also consume the openSUSE 15.4 based containers built nightly. There is still considerable log spam from deprecation notices: Mostly tentative return types and signatures, also some use of deprecated functionality like strftime. Each night a few of these disappear. They don’t stop you from running horde apps.

I also have an eye on PHP 8.2 compatibility – So far, there should not be too many surprises. I also check most unit tests against the development version of PHPUnit 10.

This code is quite solid on PHP 7.4 – production users run on it.
On PHP 8.1 I consider it ready for adoption tests. Breakage is expected, feedback is welcome. Be sure to have a backup of the database and of any mail accounts you connect to it.
There is a lot to be done over the next few weeks.

If it does not run for your combination of drivers, please contact me via the horde mailing list.

Known caveats:

• imp config SHOULD have an explicit cache setting: Set it to false to disable caching or to ‘cache’ to use Horde’s default cache. The ‘sql’ option also seems to work but I do not recommend it.
• The RPC interface has seen very little testing. The json-rpc protocol should work. I have no desire to look into xmlrpc though unless somebody voices his needs. Beware, the xmlrpc extension has moved out of mainstream into pecl.
• I do not have the necessary setup to comment on ActiveSync currently
• Kolab integration is very likely broken. I don’t think anybody really uses recent horde with ancient kolab versions.
• Most likely the SyncMl and PHPGroupware drivers are useless. If anybody really uses that bridge, please give feedback
• I usually test against sabre/dav 4.4 – if you use anything else and see bugs, let me know
• I don’t currently test against postgresql. MariaDB, MySQL, PerconaDB should work.
• As PHP’s LDAP extension has moved from resources to objects, the LDAP authentication and addressbook drivers likely need an update. I do not currently test against LDAP but this is something I want to change
• I know my former colleagues run LDAP and Redis so likely they will give some feedback in that area – Cannot comment on the timeline. I will offer a redis option for the maintaina container setup soonish.