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Last updated: October 21, 2026. We'll update this article as PHP and Linux distributions publish new information. PHP2Shell is the nickname of two critical vulnerabilities in PHP that let an attacker run code on a web server without logging in. PHP released the fixes on October 21, 2026, and IT and security teams now need to know which of their servers and computers run a vulnerable PHP version, so they can patch those first.

Discover how php2shell vulnerabilities expose PHP servers to remote code execution and how Harness virtual patching protects endpoints while you deploy fixes. On October 21, 2026, the PHP project rushed out emergency patches for two critical flaws nicknamed php2shell (CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, both rated 9.2 out of 10). This isn't a bug in some plugin or a server someone set up wrong. It's in PHP itself, in the way the language has handled errors since 2012.

How to monitor a PHP application in production: reading the PHP-FPM status page, checking OPcache health, and finding the request that is actually slow. Sejal Pandey works on content and growth at Last9, writing about observability, reliability, and SRE practices.

Laravel and Ruby on Rails are both full-stack, batteries-included MVC frameworks with an ORM, a templating engine, a CLI, and a shared philosophy: going from an empty folder to a working app shouldn't take fifty decisions first. Laravel wins when your team already lives in PHP, or when you want the largest possible pool of developers, packages (code other people have already written for common tasks), and hosting options to choose from.

Good news for PHP developers: AppSignal monitoring is now available for PHP applications. Our new package brings traces, metrics, and logs from your PHP app into AppSignal, with auto-instrumentation for frameworks like Laravel and Symfony and a foundation built on OpenTelemetry. Already using AppSignal's PHP package and want the latest updates? Migrating is straightforward: remove your current OpenTelemetry setup and follow our new install guide.

When your PHP-based application starts attracting thousands of visitors, the way you run PHP becomes critical. A slow-loading page or a server crash during peak hours can cost you revenue, users, and reputation. PHP-FPM (PHP FastCGI Process Manager) is the default way most high-performance websites run PHP. While its default configuration works fine for small to medium workloads, high-traffic applications need custom tuning to handle large volumes of requests efficiently.

PHP has evolved over the years and has become a lot more reliable, faster and refined. And with the release of PHP 8, which contained many features (named arguments, union types, attributes, constructor property promotion, match expressions, the null safe operator (?->) etc) and optimizations (JIT compiler), PHP has become more faster and cleaner. There are many more improvements and interesting features in the later versions of PHP 8. The 4 features I now rely on and wish PHP had introduced much earlier.

This blog post is based on a live presentation by Guillaume at a SymfonyCon 2023 on deploying applications with the Upsun platform-as-a-service. We utilized AI tools for transcription and to enhance the structure and clarity of the content. If you still use File Transfer Protocol (FTP) for deployment, this post is for you.

This blog is based on Thomás Di Luccio's talk "Bulletproofing for Black Friday" from the Symfony 2024 conference. Thomás is a Developer Relations Engineer at Upsun. We utilized AI tools for transcription and to enhance the structure and clarity of the content. Picture this: You're a small ticketing startup that just landed a major deal with a large venue. After months of building features and preparing for launch, the big day arrives—season ticket sales go live.

This blog is based on a presentation by Guillaume Moigneu at the Symfony 2024 conference. Machine learning and AI are no longer limited to Python and Node.js. PHP developers can now run AI models directly in their applications using modern tools and libraries. This guide shows you how to implement machine learning inference in PHP using ONNX and Transformers.