How to manage PHP in the Kiravo control panel

To change your website’s PHP version, open the website’s Advanced dropdown, choose Developer tools, then click PHP in the sidebar. Pick the version from the dropdown — and consider taking a manual backup first, because PHP version changes can break apps that aren’t compatible.

The same PHP page also lets you toggle individual extensions, restart the PHP service, view the most recent error log, and (toward the bottom) enable the IonCube loader.

Open the PHP settings

1. From your website’s dashboard, click Advanced in the top menu bar to open the dropdown.
2. Choose Developer tools.
3. In the sidebar on the left, click PHP.

Change the PHP version

At the top of the PHP page, there’s a version dropdown showing the current version (for example, 8.3 LTS). Click it to see every available version:

• Numbered versions (7.4, 8.0, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 8.4, 8.5…).
• The most stable / recommended version is usually marked clearly.
• An LTS tag marks long-term-support releases — good choices when you want a stable target that won’t change often.

Pick the version you want. The change takes effect within a few seconds.

Caution

Check with your application before changing PHP version. Major-version changes (e.g. 8.0 → 8.1, or 7.4 → 8.x) commonly break older WordPress plugins, custom code, and abandoned libraries. The safe pattern: read the changelog for your app, take a manual backup, change the version, test the site immediately, and roll back if anything looks off. WordPress core itself is broadly compatible with modern PHP — but a 5-year-old plugin in your wp-content/plugins/ might not be.

Enable or disable PHP extensions

Below the version dropdown is the PHP extensions grid. There are two kinds of extensions:

• Built-in extensions — always on. Listed but not toggleable (they’re shipped enabled and can’t be removed).
• Configurable extensions — these have checkboxes. Common configurable extensions on Kiravo include apcu, brotli, oauth, xmlrpc, and similar.

Tick a checkbox to enable an extension; untick to disable. Changes take effect almost immediately (the PHP service reloads to pick them up).

Most sites don’t need to touch this — the defaults are sensible. The case where you do touch it is when an application explicitly requires (or refuses to work with) a specific extension. Read the app’s documentation; if it says “requires the xyz extension,” check this grid and tick it.

Restart PHP

The Restart button at the top-right of the page restarts the PHP service. Reasons to do this:

• After changing an opcache setting, to clear the cached bytecode.
• After a long-running PHP script wedged the worker.
• During development, after editing a config file that’s loaded once at startup.

The restart takes a few seconds. Visitors during the restart may see a brief delay; nothing is lost.

View the PHP error log

The php-error.log panel at the bottom of the page shows recent PHP errors:

• When the file was last refreshed.
• Or, if there’s nothing logged, “No PHP errors logged since restart.”

This is the first place to check when “the site is broken but I can’t tell why.” A blank screen or a 500 error usually has its explanation here — a missing function, a fatal error, a memory limit hit.

IonCube loader

The IonCube loader is needed only if you’re running a script that was encoded with IonCube (a commercial code-protection product). Most WordPress sites don’t need it. If you do need it:

1. Scroll to the IonCube section.
2. Toggle it on.

Note

IonCube isn’t compatible with every PHP version. Specifically, the panel notes that “IonCube can’t be enabled on sites using PHP 8.0.” If the toggle is unavailable or returns an error, change to a supported PHP version first.