Operating system support #

Supported: PHP 8.0 to 8.5. Usable without support: PHP 7.4 (Exponential 6.0.15 and later). Why Exponential supports PHP 7.4

This page is for administrators choosing a machine for Exponential and for developers who want to know whether their own computer can run it. The short answer: Exponential 6.0.x runs on almost any operating system that has PHP 7.4 or later and a web server. It is plain PHP files plus a database; it has no compiled code of its own, no architecture of its own and no dependency on one C library.

The long answer is the rest of this page, sorted into honest tiers, because "runs anywhere PHP runs" is only useful when you also know what has been watched working, what should work, and what cannot work today and why.

Contents #

1. What the operating system has to provide
2. The four tiers
3. Tier 1: tested here
4. Tier 2: known to work
5. Tier 3: expected to work
6. Tier 4: not possible today (theoretical)
7. Containers, cloud and hosting panels
8. Processor architectures
9. Web servers
10. PHP SAPIs
11. Platform-specific notes
12. Check a machine in two minutes
13. Related pages

What the operating system has to provide #

Everything below comes from composer.json, settings/setup.ini and chapter 2 of the installation guide; where an item is a recommendation rather than a requirement, it says so.

Nothing in that list names an operating system. That is why the list of systems below is long.

The four tiers #

If you run Exponential on a tier 3 system, please tell the project on the community tracker or the software tracker, and the row moves up.

Tier 1: tested here #

Tier 2: known to work #

Linux distributions #

Other systems #

Tier 3: expected to work #

These have a maintained PHP 8 and nothing known stands in the way. None has been watched running Exponential.

Systems the project could not place in a tier. HP-UX on Itanium: we know of no current PHP 8 build for it; treat it as tier 4 unless your vendor has one. OS/2 and ArcaOS: earlier PHP versions were ported; whether a PHP 8 port exists is unverified here.

Tier 4: not possible today (theoretical) #

Stated plainly, because these questions come up and deserve a straight answer. In every case the obstacle is the same: there is no PHP 8 for the system, and Exponential is PHP. The day someone ports PHP 8 to one of them, the files run unchanged.

Pages like this one are honest about tier 4 so that nobody spends a weekend on a machine that cannot work, and so that anyone who wants to make one work knows that the work is a PHP port and not an Exponential port.

Containers, cloud and hosting panels #

• Docker, Podman, Kubernetes. Any image with PHP 8 and the extensions above runs Exponential; Velocity's images (ghcr.io/se7enxweb/exponential-velocity, amd64 and arm64) include the server. Keep var/ (storage, logs, the SQLite database) and settings/override on a persistent volume. With SQLite, run one container that writes: SQLite's WAL needs shared memory on one host, so several replicas cannot share one database file over a network volume. Several replicas need a database server (PostgreSQL first; see Database support) and shared storage for var/storage.
• Cloud virtual machines (Amazon EC2 including Graviton, Google Compute Engine, Azure, Hetzner, DigitalOcean and the rest) are ordinary Linux machines: tier 2 or 3 by their distribution.
• Platform as a service offerings that run PHP 8 with a writable persistent disk are expected to work (tier 3). Offerings with a read-only or ephemeral file system need var/ moved to persistent storage and a database server.
• Hosting panels. Plesk is tier 1 (the development server). cPanel and DirectAdmin are tier 3; on shared hosting without shell access, the setup wizard in the browser is the installer.

Processor architectures #

Exponential has no machine code, so the architecture matters only through PHP and the database:

Web servers #

Any web server that can pass a request to PHP and rewrite a URL to index.php serves Exponential. Setting each one up is the subject of chapter 8, Serving the site.

PHP SAPIs #

The web PHP and the command line PHP are configured separately and are often different builds; give both the same version and extensions (chapter 2).

Platform-specific notes #

Linux #

The reference platform. Package names per family are in chapter 2, and php bin/php/console exp:velocity ext install-hint <extension> prints the install command for the system it runs on.

PHP 8.0 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux #

Exponential Velocity runs on PHP 8.0 to 8.5 from its release 0.0.4.54 (20 October 2026), with nothing extra on 8.0. On RHEL 9 and its rebuilds the default AppStream PHP 8.0 works, with the el9 rpm (it depends on php-cli >= 8.0, no module stream to enable) or with Composer. On RHEL 8, whose default PHP is 7.2, enable the 8.0 stream (dnf module enable php:8.0) and use the phar or Composer; there is no el8 rpm. On PHP 8.0, AVIF image output (needs 8.1) and the dashboard's per-request memory peak (needs 8.2) are not available, $_FILES has no full_path, and a class declared with eval() that has static properties makes its worker get replaced after that request. Details: chapter 2 and the engine's PHP 8.0 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux page (extensions, systemd, SELinux, verification).

BSD #

PHP 8 and every database extension are in FreeBSD's pkg and in OpenBSD ports and NetBSD's pkgsrc. pcntl (for asynchronous publishing and Velocity's worker pool) is available. ImageMagick is found by the setup wizard under /usr/local/bin.

macOS #

Homebrew's php formula carries the extensions Exponential needs; Velocity runs with forked workers as on Linux. For development, SQLite and Velocity (or PHP's built-in server) need nothing else.

Windows #

• Use the official PHP 8 builds for Windows (x64, non-thread-safe for FastCGI) with Apache or IIS. They include the extensions Exponential needs, intl among them.
• pcntl and posix do not exist on Windows: asynchronous publishing (bin/php/ezasynchronouspublisher.php) is not available, and Velocity runs its workers as php-cgi subprocesses without copy-on-write memory sharing.
• Velocity's single-file Windows binaries are built without intl, which Exponential's setup requires, so run Velocity on Windows through the phar with the official PHP rather than through its binary (the phar path on Windows is expected to work but untested, according to the Velocity engine's own platform notes).
• The documentation and the shell commands in this help are written for Linux; translate paths and permissions.
• WSL2 runs the Linux tiers above and is the simpler path for development on Windows.

Containers #

See Containers, cloud and hosting panels.

Check a machine in two minutes #

php -v                 # 8.0 or later, for Velocity too
php -m                 # the extensions listed above
php -i | grep "Integer Size"   # 64 bits recommended

Then let the installer check the rest: the setup wizard's System check page, or exp:install and the kickstarter, which run the same critical tests and print the fix for each failure. With Velocity installed, php bin/php/console exp:velocity ext check compares the machine with the extension set Velocity expects.

Related pages #

• Chapter 2, Requirements and Chapter 8, Serving the site.
• Database support: the supported databases, in order.
• Velocity packages and binaries, Velocity web server, Velocity engines.
• PHP 8.0 support, Continuous integration.
• Deploying.
• Free documentation: these pages are free to copy, translate and improve.