PHP

PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared towards web development.^[9] It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995.^[10][11] The PHP reference implementation is now produced by the PHP Group.^[12] PHP was originally an abbreviation of Personal Home Page,^[13][14] but it now stands for the recursive acronym PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.^[15]

PHP code is usually processed on a

The standard PHP interpreter, powered by the Zend Engine, is free software released under the PHP License. PHP has been widely ported and can be deployed on most web servers on a variety of operating systems and platforms.^[18]

The PHP language has evolved without a written formal specification or standard, with the original implementation acting as the de facto standard that other implementations aimed to follow.

W3Techs reports that as of 23 May 2024^[update] (the six months after the PHP 8.3 release), PHP is used by 76.2% of all websites whose programming language could be determined, and 55.1% thereof use PHP 7 which is outdated and known to be insecure.^[19][20]

Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of PHP; and Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski, creators of the Zend Engine

PHP development began in 1993

An example of the early PHP syntax:^[23]

<!--include /text/header.html-->

<!--getenv HTTP_USER_AGENT-->
<!--if substr $exec_result Mozilla-->
  Hey, you are using Netscape!<p>
<!--endif-->

<!--sql database select * from table where user='$username'-->
<!--ifless $numentries 1-->
  Sorry, that record does not exist<p>
<!--endif exit-->
  Welcome <!--$user-->!<p>
  You have <!--$index:0--> credits left in your account.<p>

<!--include /text/footer.html-->

PHP/FI could be used to build simple,

On 22 May 2000, PHP 4, powered by the Zend Engine 1.0, was released.[12] By August 2008, this branch had reached version 4.4.9. PHP 4 is now no longer under development and nor are any security updates planned to be released.^[32][33]

On 1 July 2004, PHP 5 was released, powered by the new Zend Engine II.

Many high-profile open-source projects ceased to support PHP 4 in new code from February 5, 2008, because of the GoPHP5 initiative,[37] provided by a consortium of PHP developers promoting the transition from PHP 4 to PHP 5.^[38][39]

Over time, PHP interpreters became available on most existing

Official security support for PHP 5.6 ended on 31 December 2018.[44]

PHP received mixed reviews due to lacking native Unicode support at the core language level.^[45][46] In 2005, a project headed by Andrei Zmievski was initiated to bring native Unicode support throughout PHP, by embedding the International Components for Unicode (ICU) library, and representing text strings as UTF-16 internally.^[47] Since this would cause major changes both to the internals of the language and to user code, it was planned to release this as version 6.0 of the language, along with other major features then in development.^[48]

However, a shortage of developers who understood the necessary changes, and performance problems arising from conversion to and from UTF-16, which is rarely used in a web context, led to delays in the project.^[49] As a result, a PHP 5.3 release was created in 2009, with many non-Unicode features back-ported from PHP 6, notably namespaces. In March 2010, the project in its current form was officially abandoned, and a PHP 5.4 release was prepared to contain most remaining non-Unicode features from PHP 6, such as traits and closure re-binding.^[50] Initial hopes were that a new plan would be formed for Unicode integration, but by 2014 none had been adopted.^{[citation needed]}

During 2014 and 2015, a new major PHP version was developed, PHP 7. The numbering of this version involved some debate among internal developers.^[51] While the PHP 6 Unicode experiments had never been released, several articles and book titles referenced the PHP 6 names, which might have caused confusion if a new release were to reuse the name.^[52] After a vote, the name PHP 7 was chosen.^[53]

The foundation of PHP 7 is a PHP branch that was originally dubbed PHP next generation (phpng). It was authored by Dmitry Stogov, Xinchen Hui and Nikita Popov,^[54] and aimed to optimize PHP performance by refactoring the Zend Engine while retaining near-complete language compatibility.^[55] By 14 July 2014, WordPress-based benchmarks, which served as the main benchmark suite for the phpng project, showed an almost 100% increase in performance. Changes from phpng make it easier to improve performance in future versions, as more compact data structures and other changes are seen as better suited for a successful migration to a just-in-time (JIT) compiler.^[56] Because of the significant changes, the reworked Zend Engine was called Zend Engine 3, succeeding Zend Engine 2 used in PHP 5.^[57]

Because of the major internal changes in phpng, it must receive a new major version number of PHP, rather than a minor PHP 5 release, according to PHP's release process.^[58] Major versions of PHP are allowed to break backward-compatibility of code and therefore PHP 7 presented an opportunity for other improvements beyond phpng that require backward-compatibility breaks.^{[citation needed]} In particular, it involved the following changes:

• Many fatal or recoverable-level legacy PHP error mechanisms were replaced with modern object-oriented
  exceptions.^[59]
• The syntax for variable dereferencing was reworked to be internally more consistent and complete, allowing the use of the operators ->, [], (),{}, and ::, with arbitrary meaningful left-side expressions.[60]
• Support for legacy PHP 4-style constructor methods was deprecated.^[61]
• The behavior of the foreach statement was changed to be more predictable.^[62]
• Constructors for the few classes built-in to PHP which returned null upon failure were changed to throw an exception instead, for consistency.^[63]
• Several unmaintained or deprecated server application programming interfaces (SAPIs) and extensions were removed from the PHP core, most notably the legacy mysql extension.^[64]
• The behavior of the list() operator was changed to remove support for strings.^[65]
• Support was removed for legacy ASP-style delimiters <% and %> and <script language="php"> ... </script>.^[66]
• An oversight allowing a switch statement to have multiple default clauses was fixed.^[67]
• Support for hexadecimal number support in some implicit conversions from strings to number types was removed.^[68]
• The
  right-shift operators were changed to behave more consistently across platforms.^[69]
• Conversions between floating-point numbers and integers were changed (e.g. infinity changed to convert to zero) and implemented more consistently across platforms.[69]^[70]

PHP 7 also included new language features. Most notably, it introduced return type declarations for functions^[71] which complement the existing parameter type declarations, and support for the scalar types (integer, float, string, and boolean) in parameter and return type declarations.^[72]

PHP 8 was released on 26 November 2020, and is currently the second-most used PHP major version. PHP 8 is a major version and has breaking changes from previous versions.^[73][74] New features and notable changes include:

Just-in-time compilation is supported in PHP 8.^[75]

PHP 8's JIT compiler can provide substantial performance improvements for some use cases,^[76][77] while PHP developer Nikita Popov stated that the performance improvements for most websites will be less substantial than the upgrade from PHP 5 to PHP 7.^[78] Substantial improvements are expected more for mathematical-type operations than for common web-development use cases.^[78] Additionally, the JIT compiler provides the future potential to move some code from C to PHP, due to the performance improvements for some use cases.^[79]

PHP 8 introduced the match expression.^[80] The match expression is conceptually similar to a switch statement and is more compact for some use cases.^[81] Because match is an expression, its result can be assigned to a variable or returned from a function.^[82]

PHP 8 introduced union types, a new static return type, and a new mixed type.^[73]

"Attributes", often referred to as "annotations" in other programming languages, were added in PHP 8, which allow metadata to be added to classes.^[73]

throw was changed from being a statement to being an expression.^[83] This allows exceptions to be thrown in places that were not previously possible.^[73]

PHP 8 includes changes to allow alternate, more concise, or more consistent syntaxes in a number of scenarios. For example, the nullsafe operator is similar to the null coalescing operator ??, but used when calling methods.^[84] The following code snippet will not throw an error if getBirthday() returns null:

$human_readable_date = $user->getBirthday()?->diffForHumans();

Constructor property promotion has been added as "syntactic sugar," allowing class properties to be set automatically when parameters are passed into a class constructor.^[73] This reduces the amount of boilerplate code that must be written.^[85]

Other minor changes include support for use of ::class on objects, which serves as an alternative for the use of get_class();^[73] non-capturing catches in try-catch blocks; variable syntax tweaks to resolve inconsistencies; support for named arguments; and support for trailing commas in parameter lists, which adds consistency with support for trailing commas in other contexts, such as in arrays.^[74]

• Weak maps were added in PHP 8. A WeakMap holds references to objects, but these references do not prevent such objects from being garbage collected.^[86] This can provide performance improvements in scenarios where data is being cached; this is of particular relevance for object–relational mappings (ORM).^[73]
• Various adjustments to interfaces, such as adding support for creating DateTime objects from interfaces, and the addition of a Stringable interface that can be used for type hinting.^[73]
• Various new functions including str_contains(), str_starts_with(), and str_ends_with();^[87] fdiv(); get_debug_type(); and get_resource_id()^[73]
• Object implementation of token_get_all()^[73]

• Type annotations were also added into PHP's C source code itself to allow internal functions and methods to have "complete type information in reflection."^[88]
• Inheritance with private methods^[73]
• Abstract methods in traits improvements^[73]

PHP 8.1 was released on November 25, 2021.^[89] It added support for enumerations (also called "enums"), declaring properties as readonly (which prevents modification of the property after initialization), and array unpacking with string keys. The new never type can be used to indicate that a function does not return.^[90]

PHP 8.2 was released on December 8, 2022.^[91] New in this release are readonly classes (whose instance properties are implicitly readonly), disjunctive normal form (DNF) types, and the random extension, which provides a pseudorandom number generator with an object-oriented API,^[92] Sensitive Parameter value redaction, and a ton of other features.

Beginning on 28 June 2011, the PHP Development Team implemented a timeline for the release of new versions of PHP.^[58] Under this system, at least one release should occur every month. Once per year, a minor release should occur which may include new features. Every minor release should at least be supported for two years with security and bug fixes, followed by at least one year of only security fixes, for a total of a three-year release process for every minor release. No new features, unless small and self-contained, are to be introduced into a minor release during the three-year release process.

The mascot of the PHP project is the elePHPant, a blue

Many variations of this mascot have been made over the years. Only the elePHPants based on the original design by Vincent Pontier are considered official by the community.[208] These are collectable and some of them are extremely rare.^[209]

The following "Hello, World!" program is written in PHP code embedded in an HTML document:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <head>
        <title>PHP "Hello, World!" program</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <p><?= 'Hello, World!' ?></p>
    </body>
</html>

However, as no requirement exists for PHP code to be embedded in HTML, the simplest version of Hello, World! may be written like this, with the closing tag ?> omitted as preferred in files containing pure PHP code.^[210]

<?php echo 'Hello, World!';

The PHP interpreter only executes PHP code within its

<?='Hello, World!';

The first form of delimiters, <?php and ?>, in XHTML and other XML documents, creates correctly formed XML processing instructions.^[217] This means that the resulting mixture of PHP code and other markups in the server-side file is itself well-formed XML.

Variables are

<?php
    $name = 'John';  // variable of string type being declared and initialized
    $age = 18;       // variable of integer type being declared and initialized
    $height = 5.3;   // variable of double type being declared and initialized
    echo $name . ' is ' . $height . "m tall\n"; // concatenating variables and strings
    echo "$name is $age years old."; // interpolating variables to string
?>

In terms of keywords and language syntax, PHP is similar to C-style syntax. if conditions, for and while loops and function returns are similar in syntax to languages such as C, C++, C#, Java and Perl.^[citation needed]

PHP is

The null data type represents a variable that has no value; NULL is the only allowed value for this data type.[222]

Variables of the "resource" type represent references to resources from external sources. These are typically created by functions from a particular extension, and can only be processed by functions from the same extension; examples include file, image, and database resources.^[222]

Arrays can contain elements of any type that PHP can handle, including resources, objects, and even other arrays. Order is preserved in lists of values and in

The Standard PHP Library (SPL) attempts to solve standard problems and implements efficient data access interfaces and classes.[224]

PHP defines a large array of functions in the core language and many are also available in various extensions; these functions are well documented online PHP documentation.^[225] However, the built-in library has a wide variety of naming conventions and associated inconsistencies, as described under history above.

Custom functions may be defined by the developer:

function myAge(int $birthYear): string
{
    // calculate the age by subtracting the birth year from the current year.
    $yearsOld = date('Y') - $birthYear;

    // return the age in a descriptive string.
    return $yearsOld . ($yearsOld == 1 ? ' year' : ' years');
}

echo 'I am currently ' . myAge(1995) . ' old.';

As of 2024, the output of the above sample program is "I am currently 29 years old."

In lieu of

Since PHP 4.0.1 create_function(), a thin wrapper around eval(), allowed normal PHP functions to be created during program execution; it was deprecated in PHP 7.2 and removed in PHP 8.0[227] in favor of syntax for anonymous functions or "closures"^[228] that can capture variables from the surrounding scope, which was added in PHP 5.3. Shorthand arrow syntax was added in PHP 7.4:^[229]

function getAdder($x) {
    return fn($y) => $x + $y;
}

$adder = getAdder(8);
echo $adder(2);  // prints "10"

In the example above, getAdder() function creates a closure using passed argument $x, which takes an additional argument $y, and returns the created closure to the caller. Such a function is a first-class object, meaning that it can be stored in a variable, passed as a parameter to other functions, etc.^[230]

Unusually for a dynamically typed language, PHP supports type declarations on function parameters, which are enforced at runtime. This has been supported for classes and interfaces since PHP 5.0, for arrays since PHP 5.1, for "callables" since PHP 5.4, and scalar (integer, float, string and boolean) types since PHP 7.0.^[72] PHP 7.0 also has type declarations for function return types, expressed by placing the type name after the list of parameters, preceded by a colon.^[71] For example, the getAdder function from the earlier example could be annotated with types like so in PHP 7:

function getAdder(int $x): Closure
{
    return fn(int $y): int => $x + $y;
}

$adder = getAdder(8);
echo $adder(2); // prints "10"
echo $adder(null); // throws an exception because an incorrect type was passed
$adder = getAdder([]); // would also throw an exception

By default, scalar type declarations follow weak typing principles. So, for example, if a parameter's type is int, PHP would allow not only integers, but also convertible numeric strings, floats or Booleans to be passed to that function, and would convert them.^[72] However, PHP 7 has a "strict typing" mode which, when used, disallows such conversions for function calls and returns within a file.^[72]

Basic

If the developer creates a copy of an object using the reserved word clone, the Zend engine will check whether a __clone() method has been defined. If not, it will call a default __clone() which will copy the object's properties. If a __clone() method is defined, then it will be responsible for setting the necessary properties in the created object. For convenience, the engine will supply a function that imports the properties of the source object, so the programmer can start with a by-value replica of the source object and only override properties that need to be changed.^[233]

The

The following is a basic example of object-oriented programming in PHP 8:

<?php

abstract class User
{
    protected string $name;

    public function __construct(string $name)
    {
        // make first letter uppercase and the rest lowercase
        $this->name = ucfirst(strtolower($name));
    }

    public function greet(): string
    {
        return "Hello, my name is " . $this->name;
    }

    abstract public function job(): string;
}

class Student extends User
{
    public function __construct(string $name, private string $course)
    {
        parent::__construct($name);
    }

    public function job(): string
    {
        return "I learn " . $this->course;
    }
}

class Teacher extends User
{
    public function __construct(string $name, private array $teachingCourses)
    {
        parent::__construct($name);
    }

    public function job(): string
    {
        return "I teach " . implode(", ", $this->teachingCourses);
    }
}

$students = [
    new Student("Alice", "Computer Science"),
    new Student("Bob", "Computer Science"),
    new Student("Charlie", "Business Studies"),
];

$teachers = [
    new Teacher("Dan", ["Computer Science", "Information Security"]),
    new Teacher("Erin", ["Computer Science", "3D Graphics Programming"]),
    new Teacher("Frankie", ["Online Marketing", "Business Studies", "E-commerce"]),
];

foreach ([$students, $teachers] as $users) {
    echo $users[0]::class . "s:\n";

    array_walk($users, function (User $user) {
        echo "{$user->greet()}, {$user->job()}\n";
    });
}

This program outputs the following:

Students:
Hello, my name is Alice, I learn Computer Science
Hello, my name is Bob, I learn Computer Science
Hello, my name is Charlie, I learn Business Studies
Teachers:
Hello, my name is Dan, I teach Computer Science, Information Security
Hello, my name is Erin, I teach Computer Science, 3D Graphics Programming
Hello, my name is Frankie, I teach Online Marketing, Business Studies, E-commerce

The only complete PHP implementation is the original, known simply as PHP. It is the most widely used and is powered by the Zend Engine. To disambiguate it from other implementations, it is sometimes unofficially called "Zend PHP". The Zend Engine compiles PHP source code on-the-fly into an internal format that it can execute, thus it works as an interpreter.^[235][236] It is also the "reference implementation" of PHP, as PHP has no formal specification, and so the semantics of Zend PHP define the semantics of PHP. Due to the complex and nuanced semantics of PHP, defined by how Zend works, it is difficult for competing implementations to offer complete compatibility.^{[citation needed]}

PHP's single-request-per-script-execution model, and the fact that the Zend Engine is an interpreter, leads to inefficiency; as a result, various products have been developed to help improve PHP performance. In order to speed up execution time and not have to compile the PHP source code every time the web page is accessed, PHP scripts can also be deployed in the PHP engine's internal format by using an

• just-in-time (JIT) compiler, resulting in up to 6× performance improvements.^[239] However, since version 7.2 Zend has outperformed HHVM,^[240] and HHVM 3.24 is the last version to officially support PHP.^[241]
  • HipHop – developed at Facebook and available as open source, it transforms the PHP scripts into C++ code and then compiles the resulting code, reducing the server load up to 50%. In early 2013, Facebook deprecated it in favour of HHVM due to multiple reasons, including deployment difficulties and lack of support for the whole PHP language, including the create_function() and eval() constructs.^[242]
• Parrot – a virtual machine designed to run dynamic languages efficiently; the cross-translator Pipp transforms the PHP source code into the Parrot intermediate representation, which is then translated into the Parrot's bytecode and executed by the virtual machine.
• PeachPie – a second-generation compiler to .NET Common Intermediate Language (CIL) bytecode, built on the Roslyn platform; successor of Phalanger, sharing several architectural components
• Phalanger – compiles PHP into .Net Common Intermediate Language bytecode; predecessor of PeachPie
• Quercus – compiles PHP into Java bytecode

PHP is free software released under the PHP License, which stipulates that:^[243]

Products derived from this software may not be called "PHP", nor may "PHP" appear in their name, without prior written permission from [email protected]. You may indicate that your software works in conjunction with PHP by saying "

Foo

for PHP" instead of calling it "PHP Foo" or "phpfoo".

This restriction on the use of "PHP" makes the PHP License incompatible with the

Some other projects, such as Zephir, provide the ability for PHP extensions to be created in a high-level language and compiled into native PHP extensions. Such an approach, instead of writing PHP extensions directly in C, simplifies the development of extensions and reduces the time required for programming and testing.[255]

By December 2018 the PHP Group consisted of ten people:

exam (and previously based on PHP 5.5) for programmers to become certified PHP developers.

The PHP Foundation

PHP

Formation	November 22, 2021; 2 years ago (2021-11-22)
Founder	Automattic, Laravel, Acquia, Zend, Private Packagist, Symfony, Craft CMS, Tideways, PrestaShop, JetBrains[258]
Website	https://thephp.foundation

On 26 November 2021, the JetBrains blog announced the creation of The PHP Foundation, which will sponsor the design and development of PHP.^[259]

The foundation hires "Core Developers" to work on the PHP language's core repository. Roman Pronskiy, a member of the foundation's board, said that they aim to pay "market salaries" to developers.^[262]

The response to the foundation has mostly been positive, with the foundation being praised for better supporting the language and helping to stop the decrease in the language's popularity.^[263][264] However, it has also been criticised for adding breaking changes to minor versions of PHP, such as in PHP 8.2 where initialising members of a class out-with the original class scope would cause depreciation errors,^[265] these changes impacted a number of open source projects including WordPress. ^[266]

Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund provided more than 200,000 Euros to support the PHP Foundation.^[267]

There are two primary ways for adding support for PHP to a web server – as a native web server module, or as a CGI executable. PHP has a direct module interface called server application programming interface (SAPI), which is supported by many web servers including Apache HTTP Server, Microsoft IIS and iPlanet Web Server. Some other web servers, such as OmniHTTPd, support the Internet Server Application Programming Interface (ISAPI), which is Microsoft's web server module interface. If PHP has no module support for a web server, it can always be used as a Common Gateway Interface (CGI) or FastCGI processor; in that case, the web server is configured to use PHP's CGI executable to process all requests to PHP files.^[268]

PHP-FPM (FastCGI Process Manager) is an alternative FastCGI implementation for PHP, bundled with the official PHP distribution since version 5.3.3.^[269] When compared to the older FastCGI implementation, it contains some additional features, mostly useful for heavily loaded web servers.^[270]

When using PHP for command-line scripting, a PHP

PHP has a direct module interface called SAPI for different web servers;[273] in case of PHP 5 and Apache 2.0 on Windows, it is provided in form of a DLL file called php5apache2.dll,^[274] which is a module that, among other functions, provides an interface between PHP and the web server, implemented in a form that the server understands. This form is what is known as a SAPI.^{[citation needed]}

There are different kinds of SAPIs for various web server extensions. For example, in addition to those listed above, other SAPIs for the PHP language include the Common Gateway Interface and command-line interface.^[273][275]

PHP can also be used for writing desktop graphical user interface (GUI) applications, by using the PHP-GTK extension. PHP-GTK is not included in the official PHP distribution,^[268] and as an extension, it can be used only with PHP versions 5.1.0 and newer. The most common way of installing PHP-GTK is by compiling it from the source code.^[276]

When PHP is installed and used in cloud environments, software development kits (SDKs) are provided for using cloud-specific features.^{[citation needed]} For example:

• Amazon Web Services provides the AWS SDK for PHP^[277]
• Microsoft Azure can be used with the Windows Azure SDK for PHP.^[278]

Numerous configuration options are supported, affecting both core PHP features and extensions.^[279][280] Configuration file php.ini is searched for in different locations, depending on the way PHP is used.^[281] The configuration file is split into various sections,^[282] while some of the configuration options can be also set within the web server configuration.^[283]

PHP is a general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited to

Originally designed to create dynamic

For specific and more advanced usage scenarios, PHP offers a well-defined and documented way for writing custom extensions in C or C++.^{[288][289][290][291][292][293][294][non-primary source needed]} Besides extending the language itself in form of additional libraries, extensions are providing a way for improving execution speed where it is critical and there is room for improvements by using a true compiled language.^[295][296] PHP also offers well-defined ways for embedding itself into other software projects. That way PHP can be easily used as an internal scripting language for another project, also providing tight interfacing with the project's specific internal data structures.^[297]

PHP received mixed reviews due to lacking support for

A command line interface, php-cli, and two ActiveX Windows Script Host scripting engines for PHP have been produced.^{[citation needed]}

PHP is used for

As of January 2013[update], PHP was used in more than 240 million websites (39% of those sampled) and was installed on 2.1 million web servers.^[307]

As of 23 August 2024^[update] (nine months after PHP 8.3's release), PHP is used as the server-side programming language on 75.9% of websites where the language could be determined; PHP 7 is the most used version of the language with 52% of websites using PHP being on that version, while 33.9% use PHP 8, 13.9% use PHP 5 and 0.2% use PHP 4.^[20]

In 2019, 11% of all vulnerabilities listed by the National Vulnerability Database were linked to PHP;^[312] historically, about 30% of all vulnerabilities listed since 1996 in this database are linked to PHP. Technical security flaws of the language itself or of its core libraries are not frequent (22 in 2009, about 1% of the total although PHP applies to about 20% of programs listed).^[313] Recognizing that programmers make mistakes, some languages include taint checking to automatically detect the lack of input validation which induces many issues. Such a feature has been proposed for PHP in the past, but either been rejected or the proposal abandoned.^{[314][315][316]}

Third-party projects such as Suhosin^[317] and Snuffleupagus ^[318] aim to remove or change dangerous parts of the language.

Historically, old versions of PHP had some configuration parameters and default values for such runtime settings that made some PHP applications prone to security issues. Among these, magic_quotes_gpc and register_globals^[319] configuration directives were the best known; the latter made any URL parameters become PHP variables, opening a path for serious security vulnerabilities by allowing an attacker to set the value of any uninitialized global variable and interfere with the execution of a PHP script. Support for "magic quotes" and "register globals" settings has been deprecated since PHP 5.3.0, and removed from PHP 5.4.0.^[320]

Another example for the potential runtime-settings vulnerability comes from failing to disable PHP execution (for example by using the engine configuration directive)^[321] for the directory where uploaded files are stored; enabling it can result in the execution of malicious code embedded within the uploaded files.^{[322][323][324]} The best practice is to either locate the image directory outside of the document root available to the web server and serve it via an intermediary script or disable PHP execution for the directory which stores the uploaded files.^{[citation needed]}

Also, enabling the dynamic loading of PHP extensions (via enable_dl configuration directive)

In a 2013 analysis of over 170,000 website defacements, published by Zone-H, the most frequently (53%) used technique was the exploitation of file inclusion vulnerability, mostly related to insecure usage of the PHP language constructs include, require, and allow_url_fopen.^[331][332]

PHP includes rand()^[333] and mt_rand()[334]functions which use a pseudorandom number generator, and are not cryptographically secure. As of version 8.1, the random_int() function is included, which uses a cryptographically secure source of randomness provided by the system.^[335]

There are two attacks that can be performed over PHP entropy sources: "seed attack" and "state recovery attack".^{[citation needed]} As of 2012, a $250 GPU can perform up to 2³⁰ MD5 calculations per second, while a $750 GPU can perform four times as many calculations at the same time.^[336] In combination with a "birthday attack" this can lead to serious security vulnerabilities.^{[citation needed]}

The PHP development team provides official bug fixes for 2 years following release of each minor version, followed by another year where only security fixes are released.^[58] After this, the release is considered end of life and no longer officially supported.

Extended Long Term Support beyond this is available from commercial providers, such as Zend and others^[337][338]