Hi all,

If you use the mwscript-k8s tool to launch MediaWiki maintenance scripts on Kubernetes at WMF, this message is relevant to you.

*What is changing?*

In the month of October, production MediaWiki workloads at WMF will migrate from PHP 8.1 to 8.3. This includes maintenance scripts launched with the mwscript-k8s tool.

In advance of that change, which will occur at a future date to be announced, we have made 8.3 available on an opt-in basis for testing purposes.

If you would like to test your scripts on 8.3 ahead of time, you can now provide the --php_version=8.3 flag to the mwscript-k8s tool.

*What should I do if I encounter compatibility issues using PHP 8.3?* Please open a sub-task of https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T401855 to report the issue, so that it can be fixed.

*What about MediaWiki on PHP 8.3 more generally?*

You can access a (debug) deployment of MediaWiki running 8.3 using WikimediaDebug (https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikimediaDebug) by selecting one of the "next" backends (e.g., "k8s-mwdebug-next") available in the browser extension.

Feel free to reach out if you have any questions or concerns, either to me directly, on this thread, or via a task on Phabricator.

Many thanks, Scott French Service Ops SRE