Leaplens – Upgrade Advisor for PHP

Your host wants you on PHP 8.4 or 8.5, and you want to know what breaks first. Leaplens reads the code of your plugins and themes, finds what a newer PHP removes or deprecates, and tells you what to do about each one.

One verdict per plugin and theme

• Ready – nothing changes for it on the PHP version you picked.
• Notices – it keeps working; it only logs deprecation notices that its author should fix before the next major PHP.
• Update – the version you have breaks, a newer one is available. With “Also check available updates” on, Leaplens downloads that update to a temporary folder, scans it and tells you whether updating fixes the problem. Nothing is installed.
• Fix needed – no update fixes it yet: report it to the author (the support forum link is right there), or, for premium and custom code, send the exact lines to the vendor or developer.
• Replace – it breaks, and it is closed on WordPress.org or has not been updated for two years.

Only what is new for your site

A problem that already applies to the PHP version the site runs today is not counted: the site already works with it, so that code is either guarded or never runs. You can still show those lines with one click. This keeps the list short and the verdicts honest.

PHP 7.4 to 8.5

Pick the target version: 7.4, 8.0, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 8.4 or 8.5. The checks come from the PHPCompatibility rules for PHP_CodeSniffer, development version, which already cover PHP 8.5: the backtick operator, (boolean), (integer), (double) and (binary) casts, case ending with a semicolon, curl_close(), imagedestroy(), mysqli_execute() and the other 8.5 deprecations, along with everything removed in PHP 8.0 and deprecated in 8.1 to 8.4.

Built for shared hosting

• Runs inside WordPress: does not need exec(), a command line or an external scanning service.
• Scans in short steps of a few seconds, so it never hits the PHP time limit. Pause, resume or cancel at any time.
• Leave the page and the scan goes on in the background through WP-Cron.
• A file that would exhaust memory is skipped and listed, and the scan moves on. Files larger than 1 MB are skipped and listed.

Exact lines

Every finding names the file, the line, what changed and in which PHP version, with the suggested replacement where one exists. The Plugins screen shows a short note under each plugin the last scan found problems in.

Limits of static analysis

Leaplens reads code without running it. It cannot see code built at run time, and it can flag code that checks the PHP version before using an old function. Treat the verdicts as a checklist, and test the switch on a staging copy first.

Third-party code

The vendor folder is the scanning engine, not a development tool: Leaplens loads these libraries at run time to read the code of your plugins and themes.

• PHP_CodeSniffer 4.0.4 – BSD-3-Clause – https://github.com/PHPCSStandards/PHP_CodeSniffer
• PHPCSUtils 1.2.3 – LGPL-3.0-or-later – https://github.com/PHPCSStandards/PHPCSUtils
• PHPCompatibility 10 development version – LGPL-3.0-or-later – https://github.com/PHPCompatibility/PHPCompatibility (commit 4b1ac835)

Tests, documentation and command-line-only files are left out. PHPCSUtils and PHPCompatibility are otherwise unchanged; in PHP_CodeSniffer the command-line code paths that call exec(), shell_exec() and proc_open() are removed, so the plugin ships no such calls. Their license files are in the vendor folder.