Heard you don't want to migrate to PHP 7? Dare us!
SignIn
Star Wars Welcomes You to the Family!
Welcome
Assigned Codename :
Logout
```
In the code above, if the `$userInfo` is not set, then it means the user has not logged in yet, so we display the signin button. If the user has signed in, then we grab the user's info and display it along with the `logout` button.
**Important Security Note:** If you have an API for your application, the [`id_token` should not be used to secure the API](https://auth0.com/blog/why-should-use-accesstokens-to-secure-an-api); instead use an `access_token` with the appropriate configuration. You can read about how to [implement API authentication with Auth0](https://auth0.com/docs/apis) with [implicit grant](https://auth0.com/docs/api-auth/tutorials/implicit-grant).
### Run The App
Go to your terminal and run `composer install` to install the dependencies. Next, run your PHP 5.x server. If your PHP server is accessible from the terminal, then you can run it via `php -S localhost:3000`.
Open your browser and test the app. The index page should look like this:
_Index Page_
Now, signup & signin.
_Sign In_
When you are logged in, you should be assigned a Star Wars codename like so:
_Logged In_
Our app is now running successfully on a PHP 5.x server. You can grab the [source code from Github](https://github.com/auth0-blog/starwars-phpapp) to ensure that everything works as expected.
### Migrating our PHP5 App to PHP7
We are currently running a PHP 5.x app. Let's migrate it to PHP 7. The good thing is that most times you might not have to change anything in the codebase. Let's see if that holds true for this app.
Upgrade your server to at least PHP 7.0.0 and run this app again.
_PHP 7 Server running_
_App running on PHP 7 without any errors_
Awesome, now our first app is running on PHP 7 successfully!
## Work with Second App
The second PHP app we will go through is an API. It is a simple Chuck Norris API. It has been built already with PHP 5 in mind.
Clone it from [Github](https://github.com/auth0-blog/basic-api) and run `composer install` to install all the dependencies. Then run the app on a PHP 5.x server.
Open up [Postman](https://www.getpostman.com) and test the API like so:
Run `http://localhost:3000/jokes/categories` like so:
_API showing categories_
Run `http://localhost:3000/jokes/random` like so:
_API showing random jokes_
The app is working fine, no errors!
### Use PHP 7 features in Second App
Let's refactor this app and integrate some PHP 7 features.
This is the directory structure of our API app at the moment:
```bash
----basic-api
|
----src
| |
| ----Main.php
|
----vendor
|
----.gitignore
|
----.htaccess
|
----composer.json
|
----composer.lock
|
----index.php
|
----README.md
```
This is how our `Main.php` file looks like right now:
```php
getCategoryData();
}
private function getCategoryData() {
return [
"explicit",
"dev",
"movie",
"food",
"celebrity",
"science",
"political",
"sport",
"religion",
"animal",
"music",
"history",
"travel",
"career",
"money",
"fashion"
];
}
public function getRandomJokes($randomNumber) {
if( !is_integer($randomNumber)) {
throw new Exception("The random number should be an integer. Please try again.");
}
$jokes = [
"Jon Skeet’s code doesn’t follow a coding convention. It is the coding convention.",
"Jon Skeet can divide by Zero.",
"Jon Skeet points to null, null quakes in fear.",
"Jon Skeet is the traveling salesman. Only he knows the shortest route.",
"When Jon pushes a value onto a stack, it stays pushed.",
"Drivers think twice before they dare interrupt Jon’s code.",
"Jon Skeet does not sleep…. He waits.",
"Jon Skeet can stop an infinite loop just by thinking about it.",
"Jon Skeet uses Visual Studio to burn CDs.",
"Jon Skeet has the key to Open Source. He just doesn’t want to close it."
];
return $jokes[$randomNumber];
}
}
```
Let's start by adding PHP 7 return type declarations to the methods in this class like so:
```php
getCategoryData();
}
private function getCategoryData(): array {
return [
"explicit",
"dev",
"movie",
"food",
"celebrity",
"science",
"political",
"sport",
"religion",
"animal",
"music",
"history",
"travel",
"career",
"money",
"fashion"
];
}
public function getRandomJokes($randomNumber): string {
if( !is_integer($randomNumber)) {
throw new Exception("The random number should be an integer. Please try again.");
}
$jokes = [
"Jon Skeet’s code doesn’t follow a coding convention. It is the coding convention.",
"Jon Skeet can divide by Zero.",
"Jon Skeet points to null, null quakes in fear.",
"Jon Skeet is the traveling salesman. Only he knows the shortest route.",
"When Jon pushes a value onto a stack, it stays pushed.",
"Drivers think twice before they dare interrupt Jon’s code.",
"Jon Skeet does not sleep…. He waits.",
"Jon Skeet can stop an infinite loop just by thinking about it.",
"Jon Skeet uses Visual Studio to burn CDs.",
"Jon Skeet has the key to Open Source. He just doesn’t want to close it."
];
return $jokes[$randomNumber];
}
}
```
_PHP 7 Return Type Declarations added in Main.php_
Another PHP 7 feature we can add is *function parameter typehinting*. We have a method, `getRandomJokes($randomNumber)` that accepts a `$randomNumber` which is an integer.
Let's refactor that method, `getRandomJokes()`. We'll eliminate the `if` condition and just typehint the `$randomNumber` parameter like so:
```php
public function getRandomJokes(int $randomNumber): string {
$jokes = [
"Jon Skeet’s code doesn’t follow a coding convention. It is the coding convention.",
"Jon Skeet can divide by Zero.",
"Jon Skeet points to null, null quakes in fear.",
"Jon Skeet is the traveling salesman. Only he knows the shortest route.",
"When Jon pushes a value onto a stack, it stays pushed.",
"Drivers think twice before they dare interrupt Jon’s code.",
"Jon Skeet does not sleep…. He waits.",
"Jon Skeet can stop an infinite loop just by thinking about it.",
"Jon Skeet uses Visual Studio to burn CDs.",
"Jon Skeet has the key to Open Source. He just doesn’t want to close it."
];
return $jokes[$randomNumber];
}
```
Now if you try to pass in a value asides an integer like so:
```php
$router->get('/jokes/random', function() use ($app){
echo json_encode($app->getRandomJokes("dsdsds"));
});
```
_index.php_
PHP 7 will throw a Type Error like so:
_PHP 7 TypeError_
We have been able to add some PHP 7 features. The app also runs on a PHP 7 server and everything just works fine!
The source code of the PHP 7 version of the API can be found on the [`php7 branch` on GitHub](https://github.com/auth0-blog/basic-api/tree/php7).
## Performance
PHP 7 runs on the new Zend engine 3.0, thus making your apps see up to 2x faster performance and 50% better memory consumption than PHP 5.6. It also allows you to serve more concurrent users without adding any hardware.
[Rasmus Ledorf](https://twitter.com/rasmus), *Creator of PHP* and inventor of the SQL LIMIT clause did some benchmarking with a few popular PHP projects with the various versions of PHP from PHP 5.4 up until PHP 7.0 and also benchmarked against HHVM 3.6.1.
Let's take a good look at the benchmarks. The test box specs Rasmus used are:
* Gigabyte Z87X-UD3H i7-4771 4 cores @ 3.50GHz w/ 16G of Ram @ 1600MHz
* Hyperthreading enabled for a total of 8 virtual cores
* Toshiba THNSNHH256GBST SSD
* Linux debian 3.16.0-4-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 3.16.7-ckt9-2 (2015-04-13) x86_64 GNU/Linux
* MySQL 5.6.24
* Nginx-1.6.2 + php-fpm for all tests unless indicated otherwise
* Quiet local 100Mbps network
* Siege benchmark tool run from a separate machine
_ZenCart 1.5.4_
_Moodle 2.9-dev_
_Cachet_
_Traq 3.5.2_
_Geeklog 2.1.0_
_Wardrobe CMS 1.2.0_
_Opencart 2.0.2.0_
_MediaWiki 1.24.1_
_phpBB 3.1.3_
_Wordpress 4.1.1_
_Drupal 8_
From the results above, you can see that we can make double the amount of requests in less time in PHP 7 than PHP 5.
These specs can be found in the `Speeding Up The Web With PHP 7` talk he gave at Fluent Conf, 2015.
Check out the following benchmarks:
* [php7-benchmarks](https://github.com/martin-helmich/php7-benchmarks)
* [php7 final version vs hhvm benchmark](https://kinsta.com/blog/the-definitive-php-7-final-version-hhvm-benchmark)
* [hhvm vs php7 performance show down - Wordpress, Nginx](http://blog.wpoven.com/2016/04/14/hhvm-vs-php-7-performance-showdown-wordpress-nginx)
## Conclusion
We have successfully covered how to upgrade your development and server environments from PHP 5 to PHP 7, gone through the features PHP 7 offers and also migrated two apps from PHP 5 to PHP 7.
Woot! Woot! It's been quite a journey highlighting everything PHP 7 has to offer. PHP has grown tremendously over the years from a toy language to a full-blown fast and enterprise language.
The [PHP Manual](http://php.net/manual/en/index.php) and [RFC](https://wiki.php.net/RFC) documents remain the most complete go-to reference for any of the new PHP 7 features. You can always leverage them for more information.