It's come to "that time of year" again and Jordi Boggiano has posted the latest update in his series of PHP usage statistics. In this summary he looks at the PHP versions installed based on the packagist.org logs for developers using Composer.

It's that time of the year again, where I figure it's time to update my yearly data on PHP version usage. Last year's post showed 5.5 as the main winner and 5.3 declining rapidly. Let's see what 2015 brought.

[...] A quick note on methodology, because all these stats are imperfect as they just sample some subset of the PHP user base. [...] Composer sends the PHP version it is running with in its User-Agent header, so I can use that to see which PHP versions people are using Composer with. Of course this data set is probably biased towards development machines and CI servers and as such it should also be taken with a grain of salt.

He first compares the statics for his 2015 searches against the 2014 stats and shows the differences in usage for PHP versions 5.3.3 up to 5.6.0. Fortunately, the results show a rise in the usage of PHP 5.5 and a decline in all others...but it's not too much of a difference (2-3% range). Pie graphs are also included to help visualize these differences. He also includes some statistics on what PHP versions are required by certain packages for the ones listed on Packagist with increases starting with 5.4 and the largest advance for 5.5.