In the last article, we discussed the changes required to get Drupal 9.1 running on PHP 8. At that time, we got the Drupal 9.1 dev release working on PHP 8.0.0 RC4 with a few patches. Since then, a lot has changed with many of those patches being committed and Drupal 9.2 dev open for development. But we’ll talk about all of that at a later date. Today, let’s look at getting some of the common PHP extensions and configure it to run with Drupal.

We left off at a point where we have plain Drupal 9.1 running on a plain PHP 8 RC4 setup. Drupal doesn’t require any extensions, not in PHP core, and that means we only had to enable extensions like gd, MySQL, and others to have Drupal 9.1 running. With that, we were able to install Umami and use the site without any problems at all. To enable those extensions, we only needed our docker-php-ext-enable script, which is part of the PHP base Docker image. See the Dockerfile in the reference repository for the source code (lines 41-52). Installing other extensions that are not part of the PHP core is not quite that simple. Think of it this way: if a module is present in Drupal core, you can install it right after downloading Drupal. But if it is a contrib module, you have to download and install it separately. It’s the same thing with PHP extensions.

Why test with extensions?

Just as you probably wouldn’t have a Drupal site with at least one contrib module, you probably wouldn’t have a PHP installation without a few of the common extensions. Drupal core utilizes some of these extensions when they are available (such as APCu and YAML), which yields better performance. This means that even though the extensions are not technically required, you would most likely have them.