These questions were shown only to the developers who chose PHP as one of their three primary programming languages.

PHP

Shares of PHP as primary programming language by country or region

The popularity of PHP is still the highest in France: 43% of French developers use it as a primary language, which is 5 percentage points more than last year.

Which version of PHP do you regularly use?

PHP 7.4 usage continued to grow over the past year. Now it is the most popular PHP version (76%, 32 percentage points added since 2020). The new PHP 8.0 is also rapidly growing and 34% of PHP developers said they use it.

Which PHP development environments do you regularly use?

The majority of PHP developers are using local environments (74%). The share of containerized environments hasn’t grown over the last year and remains at 45%.

How do you usually debug PHP code?

Which PHP frameworks and platforms do you regularly use?

The popularity of Laravel has increased massively in the last year (from 50% to 67%). The shares of Symfony (24%) and WordPress (22%) remain similar to before.

Do you use any libraries or frameworks for asynchronous PHP?

The usage of async tools has not changed significantly since last year. But with Fibers accepted for PHP 8.1 and the Laravel Octane release planned for 2021, we may see an increased awareness and adoption of async techniques in PHP.

How do you run your PHP applications in production?

Which editor / IDE do you mostly use for PHP development?

Despite all the measures we’ve taken to secure a representative pool of respondents, the results may be slightly shifted towards users of JetBrains products, as they are more likely to take the survey.

Which testing frameworks do you regularly use?

Writing tests has become more common among PHP developers (72%, an increase of 8 percentage points). PHPUnit usage (63%) has increased by 13 percentage points. The breakthrough award goes to Pest which was first released in 2020, but already has a 6% share.

What additional quality tools do you use regularly?

Do you use static analysis?

The popularity of static analysis tools in the PHP ecosystem continues to grow. Although, when compared to other languages, PHP’s static analysis adoption is still below average.

If you are looking into static analysis for PHP projects, consider Qodana, which lets you run PhpStorm checks on CI in a Docker container.

What template engines do you use?

What tools for profiling or measuring performance do you use?

What types of software do you develop with PHP?

PHP is still primarily used to develop websites (81%), while another relatively common field of implementation is utilities (27%).

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PhpStorm

Lightning-smart PHP IDE

Kotlin

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