It seems like the decision is made – the next LTS version of Ubuntu Server (Xenial) will get PHP 7 as default. This is great news and really good for the whole internet community as it will affect a lot of things in a positive way. One of those things are the speed of sites on the web. If you read our previous post about speed improvements in ownCloud when running PHP 7, you know that PHP 7 has a huge impact on load speed, and as Ubuntu Server is widely used we think that there will be a noticeable difference when surfing around the web in general.

If you want to test Ubuntu Server 16.0x you could download the daily builds and help testing it by doing the following:

How to test:
– Do not do this in production!
– Spin up a test VM/deployment with Xenial.
– Add the PPA at https://launchpad.net/~php-ubuntu/+archive/ubuntu/php7.0
– Ideally, simply an apt-get update; apt-get upgrade will pick up the
new versions under Xenial.
– Packages are going to be changed and updated as we go forward.
– Most of main/universe PHP-dependent packages have been rebuilt.

Ubuntu 16.04 is planned to be released April 21st, and of course we will update all our ownCloud VMs so that you get the latest stuff. Until then, please help test the daily builds and report bugs if you find any. If you want to follow the development, subscribe to this bug report.

Update 2016-03-27: PHP 7 is in!