When will PHP 5.6 be in the official Canonical repos?

I imagine it won't up until 14.10 is released, but even if that is the case, could we expect to see it show up in the repos that 14.04 uses?

Updated: I Just got an email back from Marc Deslauriers (security engineer at Canonical, so somebody who would know) and the answer is: Probably never. Unless something goes catastrophically wrong with 5.5, it'll have security patches backported for the lifespan of 14.04.

Yes, like most packages in Ubuntu, the security team backports security fixes, including for versions that are no longer supported by upstream.

As of 15.04, the php5* packages are version 5.6. However I would not recommend using a non-LTS release on a production server as they require release upgrades every 9 months (opposed to the 5 years an LTS gets you).

And the only Canonical-supported version in 16.04 seems to be PHP7.

Around June 2016, maybe earlier, maybe never. There are a few different forces at play here:

• Ubuntu doesn't do major upgrades on packages unless it's required or globally desirable.
• PHP 5.6 is not fully backwards compatible with PHP 5.5 code, making a mid-term upgrade undesirable; potentially devastating for production servers.
• But PHP 5.5 will only be supported to June 2016.

So unless somebody jumps in an plans on manually maintaining 5.5 (stranger things have happened) there probably will be a transition at some point. It's impossible to say when that'll be this far out though.

If you're deploying on 5.5, I'd get testing on 5.6 well in advance, just to make sure you're not caught out. Another option is to use a branch of PHP (like Zend Server) that has commercial support seemingly spanning into the next millennium.

If you really want PHP 5.6 on Ubuntu 12.04, 14.04 or 14.10, you can use this PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php5-5.6
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install php5

The default php5 package dependency will pull libapache2-mod-php5 that in turn depends on Apache. If you want to use different PHP SAPI, make sure you explicitly list it when installing, f.e. for PHP FPM use:

sudo apt-get install php5 php5-fpm

Annotation: Since December 2015 if you have Apache installed, there is also a dependency on Ondrej's Apache2 PPA:

ppa:ondrej/apache2

As an option I would strongly recommend to use ppa:ondrej/php that includes co-installable PHP 5.6 and PHP 7.0 versions:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php
sudo apt-get update
# pull a default PHP FPM (currently PHP 7.0)
sudo apt-get install php php-fpm
# pull PHP 7.0 Apache2 mod_php7 explicitly
sudo apt-get install php7.0 libapache2-mod-php7.0
# pull PHP 5.6 - just CGI SAPI
sudo apt-get install php5.6-cgi