PHP build and runtime updates

Change effective on 26 February 2016

Heroku’s support for PHP application received several updates today; below is a list of the most important changes.

Applications that utilize a custom composer.phar will no longer get composer aliased to that custom file at runtime. A custom composer.phar will only be used during builds.

The Composer bin-dir of an application is now automatically appended to $PATH at runtime.

The PHP setting expose_php now defaults to “off”; Apache ServerTokens now defaults to “Prod”; Nginx server_tokens now defaults to “off”.

PHP applications on Heroku may now use their own platform repositories to use custom builds of web servers, runtimes, or extensions without having to run a forked version of the buildpack. This is an experimental feature, and no support is offered for issues related to this functionality.