Tesseract OCR is now available with PHP Runtime Generation 2. This open-source optical character recognition (OCR) engine can be used in combination with Apache Tika to enable your sites to extract text from images and scanned documents.
As a follow-up to our release note announcing the removal of PHP Runtime Generation 1, we're now providing specific dates for the removal from the platform.
All environments that have not been upgraded to PHP Runtime Generation 2 will be auto-upgraded on the following schedule:
After these dates, PHP Runtime Generation 1 will no longer be available.
We strongly recommend that all site owners proactively test and upgrade to Generation 2 rather than waiting for the auto-upgrade. This allows you to:
Please review the Known Changes and Requirements if you are still in the process of upgrading your site.
New sites created on the Pantheon platform now default to Tika 3.x. Previously, new sites defaulted to Tika 1.x.
This change only affects newly created sites. Existing sites will continue to use their current Tika version and are not impacted by this update.
If you need to use Tika 1.x for a new site, you can explicitly set the version in your pantheon.yml file:
However, Tika 1.x will be removed on January 26, 2026. We recommend testing your site with Tika 3.x and migrating before this date.
PHP versions 8.3.30 and 8.4.17 are now available on the platform. These updates include bug fixes and enhancements that improve performance and stability. Updates will be applied automatically over the next few days, so no manual action is required.
PHP 8.3.30 is available on both PHP Runtime Generation 1 and PHP Runtime Generation 2.
PHP 8.4 is only available with the new PHP Runtime Generation 2.
The PHP Foundation officially considers PHP 8.1 as End Of Life status as of December 31, 2025.
However, Pantheon includes LTS security coverage for all available PHP versions with PHP Runtime Generation 2. This coverage is automatic and requires no further action. By providing LTS editions of older PHP versions, customers can safely operate their sites while working through upgrade plans to modern versions.
For the best performance and security, Pantheon recommends running PHP 8.2 and above.
The final set of sites previously excluded from the PHP Runtime Generation 2 rollout are now being migrated. These sites were excluded because they were using Solr 3 with Drupal 9+. With Solr 3 support for Drupal 9+ ending in December 2025, these sites are no longer excluded from the Generation 2 rollout.
| Start Date | Environments |
|---|---|
| January 7, 2026 | Dev/Multidev |
| January 14, 2026 | Test/Live |
Once the Dev environment for a site has been upgraded to Generation 2, deploying commits from Dev to Test will automatically upgrade the Test environment to Generation 2 as well. Following this pattern, an upgrade to the Live environment takes place once commits are deployed from the Test to Live environment.
Sites may continue to opt out of PHP Runtime Generation 2 until the Gen 1 removal takes place starting April 6, 2026.
Editorial note: These updates were completed and deployed to the platform on December 23rd 2025.
PHP versions 8.1.34, 8.2.30, 8.3.29, and 8.4.16 are now available on the platform. These updates include important security fixes, along with bug fixes and enhancements that improve performance and stability. Updates will be applied automatically over the next few days, so no manual action is required.
PHP 8.4 is only available with the new PHP Runtime Generation 2.
The PHP 8.4 upgrade process automatically includes an upgrade to PHP Runtime Generation 2 if your site hasn't been upgraded already.
Important PHP version information
For the best performance and security, Pantheon recommends running PHP 8.2 and above.
The phpredis extension has been updated to the latest version, 6.3.0, for environments using PHP 7.4+ on PHP Runtime Generation 2.
To view the latest improvements and fixes, view the changelog on GitHub.