Option to hide PHP version check?

[EvDoorne]

I run Panopticon on websites that are hosted on servers running Ubuntu LTS's such as 20.04 and 22.04. When new PHP version become available, it usually takes a while before the new PHP versions become available in the repositories used. Until then, the server will not upgrade its PHP Version(s). This is also subject to the approval of the organisation that manages the LTS's.

If a new PHP version becomes available, the Panopticon Dashboard shows there is a new PHP version available. This does not however take into account that the newer PHP version is not yet available for install on the LTS used.

I wonder if that is actually usefull information from the point of view of monitoring. Yes, a new PHP version is available but no, the server can not yet be updated. Ofcourse monitoring the PHP version used is useful, but stating one should update the PHP version while that is actually not possible is not useful in my opinion. I would expect the message to state a new PHP version that is actually available and can be installed though.

To be clear: showing that PHP versions are EOL is and needs to remain part of the Dashboard information.

[nikosdion]

Panopticon does not magically decide that your PHP version is old. Every 24 hours it queries a third party service for the released PHP version numbers. This service is several hours behind the actual release of a new PHP version by the PHP project. Therefore, Panopticon is actually late to notify you about a new PHP version by at least half a day, and usually a day and a half.

Moreover, the role of monitoring is to provide the objective state of your site. The objective state of your site is that it's running on a PHP version that is older than the latest version released by the PHP project within that PHP branch.

Further to that, what you request falls under the scope of customisation for a specific use case that cannot be possibly catered to by mass-distributed software. You can of course modify the code to fit your needs. Both the presentation (view templates), and the core code can be overridden in the user_code directory, as per the documentation.

As far as the possibility to install a just-released PHP version goes, the fact that your organisation decided to use the slowest available update source, and add another bureaucratic layer of delays on top of that, is not an objective unavailability of PHP for installation.

One option is to compile it yourself. This is what major commercial hosts do. The downside is that you need to invest in the infrastructure: a build server, a test server, and automatic deployment (e.g. Ansible, Puppet, …) at the very least.

Another option is to use a third party service which does the compilation for you. Commercial hosts typically outsource that to cPanel, Plesk, etc.

Since you are using Ubuntu Server LTS, just like me, you can of course install PHP from https://launchpad.net/~ondrej/+archive/ubuntu/php which does make the latest released PHP version available within a few hours from its release. These are the actual packages which will be included in Debian, which are then downstreamed by Ubuntu.