The PHP team just released PHP 8.6.0 RC7 and wants you to test it. The announcement says the next release will be PHP 8.6.0 GA, planned for November 19, 2026.

That gives you one week to run your app, framework, or package against 8.6 and report what breaks. RC7 is a test build, and the announcement says it plainly:

Please DO NOT use this version in production, it is an early test version.

What's in RC7

The NEWS file has two sections dated November 12, one for RC6 and one for RC7. The php.net announcement calls RC7 the fifth release candidate, and the php.net archive has no separate RC6 post. So if you're coming from RC5, these are the changes since then:

  • Date: timelib is updated to 2026.03.
  • Fileinfo: TrueType fonts no longer come back as application/octet-stream, a regression since libmagic 5.48 (GH-25051). HWPX files also get the correct MIME type now.
  • OpenSSL: Fixes a use-after-free in TLS server ALPN and Windows certificate checks. It happened when the session stream passed to stream_socket_enable_crypto() was closed before the handshake.
  • Streams: Fixes a use-after-free of the previous request's default stream context. It happened when a stream error came up during request startup, such as when PHP couldn't buffer a POST body to a temporary file.
  • Core: The array_map() optimization now resolves the function name of a first-class callable. RC4 fixed the same optimization for the class name of a static first-class callable.
  • Core: Globals now have padding so that fields added in patch releases don't cause an ABI incompatibility.

Extension Maintainers

The ABI padding change follows the php2shell fix, which changed the ABI in PHP 8.6. As we covered when the release managers added RC6, that means the API version gets bumped and extensions need to be rebuilt. If you maintain a PECL or custom extension, build it against RC7 now instead of waiting for GA.

How to Test It

The PHP 8.6 release timetable has the full schedule. For everything else we've written about this release, see the PHP 8.6 tag. Give RC7 a run against your test suite this week!