Upgrade Guide¶

Upgrading to V6¶

Phalcon v6 is a major release. The most significant change is architectural: Phalcon is no longer a C extension. From v6 onwards the framework is implemented in pure PHP and is distributed as a Composer package. There is nothing to compile and nothing to load in your php.ini.

Requirements¶

PHP 8.1¶

Phalcon v6 supports only PHP 8.1 and above. PHP 8.1 active support has already expired, including security fixes. We will be supporting this version for a while longer, offering developers more time to upgrade their applications.

Installation¶

Phalcon v6 is installed via Composer:

composer require phalcon/phalcon

While v6 is in alpha, you may need to allow pre-release versions:

composer require phalcon/phalcon:^6.0@alpha

Unlike previous versions, Phalcon is no longer a C extension: there is nothing to compile and nothing to enable in your php.ini. Once Composer has added the package, the Phalcon\ namespaces are available through the autoloader.

Notable Changes¶

Annotations¶

The annotations component has changed how it reads metadata. In v5 and earlier, annotations were read from class, method, and property docblocks (for example @Column(type="integer")) by a parser written in C. In v6 the component reads native PHP 8 attributes (#[Column(type: 'integer')]) through the Reflection API. Docblock annotations are no longer supported. Code that relied on the docblock syntax must be migrated to attributes. See Annotations for the new usage.