What’s happening with IBM Cloud Functions and PHP?

I’m excited to announce that IBM Cloud Functions officially supports PHP 7.3, which has been optimized for latency.

The new PHP 7.3 runtime leverages a new web proxy built with Go that replaces the previous Python web proxy. This allows action invocations to respond faster by providing lower latency for blocking calls.

Ready to try it out?

1. Create the following PHP file.

   <!--?php
   function main(array $args) : array
   {
   $name = $args["name"] ?? "IBM Cloud";
   $greeting = "Hello $name!";
   return ["body" => $greeting];<br ?-->
   }

2. Create the helloPHP action.

   ibmcloud fn action update helloPHP hello.php --kind php:7.3 --web true

3. Invoke the action.

   ibmcloud fn action invoke helloPHP -r
   {
   "body": "Hello IBM Cloud!"
   }

4. Get the URL for the web action.

   ibmcloud fn action get helloPHP --url

5. Open the URL in your browser.

How much faster is PHP 7.3?

As you can see in the graph below comparing warm invocation performance, PHP 7.3 is much faster than PHP 7.1 or PHP 7.2. Start new projects by using PHP 7.3 or migrate any existing actions.

How do I learn more?

To set up a project and deploy your PHP 7.3 action, check out the IBM Cloud Functions documentation.