Learn about Bitnami PHP application modules deprecation

For more than ten years, Bitnami modules for LAMP technology stacks (LAMP, MAMP, WAMP) have greatly simplified the development of PHP applications such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla! and many others. Thanks to these modules, developers were able to quickly and easily provision application development environments and avoid the burden of having multiple installations (with servers, databases or applications) for development or testing.

But these advantages came with some drawbacks. Each module was certified to work only on a specific version of LAMP, so developers had to manually maintain the synchronization between their installed modules and their verified LAMP stack. In addition, LAMP stacks were designed for development purposes and were consequently different from production setups in terms of security, configuration and additional production components (PHP-FPM, etc.). These drawbacks sometimes led to unexpected incompatibilities when transitioning from development to production.

Technologies have evolved as well. Computers are more powerful, storage is faster and cheaper, and Internet speed is no longer a problem. Virtualisation has become mainstream and cloud providers now offer affordable services that anyone can use. Containers and Kubernetes are the new horsepower of enterprise computing.

At Bitnami, we firmly believe that development environments should evolve with technology and always imitate, as much as possible, their production architectures. Thus, modules have become less relevant and less appropriate for application development in favour of modern approaches based on VMs or containers. This is the reason behind the act of deprecating them.

Will I still be able to install several applications in a single host using Bitnami stacks?

With applications based on virtualisation technologies, developers can easily provision - manually or automatically, locally or in the cloud - VMs and containers for their applications resembling their production architectures.

This is where Bitnami is focused today: providing the best applications and components for a great development and production experience for you and your teams.

The Bitnami Application Catalog provides an extended list of applications and components that you can launch and use to develop your applications:

• For local development, Bitnami installers and virtual machines enable you to quickly install several applications in the same machine.
• If you prefer to launch your applications in the cloud, Bitnami provides a large deployment offering for the major cloud providers. Deploy several servers in the platform of your choice and combine them to develop your application.
• Bitnami has released container images for most of the components you may need to build your applications. Use them to deploy several solutions in the same local machine that you can use later to move to a production environment combining them with Bitnami Helm charts.

Learn more

Check out this guide to learn how to use Bitnami development containers to start developing your applications.

Don’t forget to visit the tutorials site where you will find a lot of examples of how to move quickly from development to production using Bitnami containers and Helm charts.

Do you have questions about Bitnami LAMP Modules deprecation? You can visit this github repository. We will be happy to help you.