PHP application maintenance and development

Record PHP versions in web and command-line environments: they may differ. Check extensions, Composer constraints and code using deprecated features.

Test the transition on a copy with equivalent dependencies and configuration. Investigate warnings rather than only hiding them. Version selection considers application compatibility and the branch’s support lifetime.

A successful API response may only acknowledge queued work. Check workers, delays, failures and scheduled commands. Long operations need understandable states.

Retries are bounded and safe: repeating a job must not charge a payment or create a document twice. Failed tasks retain enough context for investigation without exposing secrets in logs.

Plan schema migrations alongside code changes. Removing a column can break an old version that is still running, so deployment order matters. Assess locking and duration for large tables.

Reverting code and restoring data are different operations. Before release, determine whether the old code supports the new schema, how new records will be preserved and when a forward fix is preferable to restoring a database.

Check validation, permissions, timeouts and integration responses. Tests focus on meaningful rules: who may change an order, which transitions are allowed and what happens when a request is repeated.

Logs relate to individual operations without recording passwords or tokens. Documentation covers startup, environment variable names without secret values, queues and deployment. This reduces reliance on a single developer’s memory.