Upping PHP requirements to 5.5.9

The Symfony 3.0 as well as latest version of Whoops library have raised their requirements from PHP 5.4 to PHP 5.5.9. For Grav to stay current with these libraries that we rely upon, we will have to follow suit.

I think the majority of people run Grav on PHP 5.5 or PHP 5.6 so this is probably a non issue, but just wanted to throw this out there that we are going to have to updated the minimum requirements pretty soon.

FWIW PHP has gotten faster with each release, where PHP 5.4 is the slowest, and the newly released PHP 7.0 is about twice as fast as the previous PHP 5.6!

A fair few hosts allow switching between 5.3, 5.4, 5.5, and 5.6 without issue, but it would seemingly be a good idea for the release of 1.0 to support 5.3 to 5.6 (in major releases), as a lot of hosts keep only one PHP installation available. Would there be great technical disadvantages from allowing the use of a older version of Symfony, thus allowing PHP down to 5.3?

Also, has PHP 7 reached a stable level so that adaption by hosts is becoming a reality?

The important thing is that PHP 5.4 is already EOL. PHP 5.5 will be EOL this year. Grav already requires PHP 5.4 (not 5.3) but fixes for PHP 7 (which is rolling out fast) are in the latest versions of the libraries that in our case have dropped support for PHP 5.4.

I am have set my host (1and1.co.uk) to PHP 7 for our grav site ( http://drpbanerji.com ). There are currently no additional plugins to those commonly found in a standard couple-of-months-old deliver skeleton.
Seems to run OK ... but I don't actually know how to test. Is there any reason to drop down to PHP 5.6 at the present time?

Recently I stumbled upon a server that has an option in the cPanel to switch versions of PHP. However server command line has 5.4.45. I am pretty sure the server runs the selected version from cPanel, but is there a way to BYPASS the bin/gpmattention & automatic abortion of update? Or is it required for updating?

Usually most servers, even those shared hosting ones, have the ability to let you change the version of PHP in the CLI. Each server setup is different, but I have outlined how to do this for a few providers in our Hosting docs.

This usually involved locating the newer version of PHP, and adding that path to your users's PATH shell variable. Then the newer version of PHP will be found before the 'default' system one.

I got in touch with support, they had aliases for paths for versions. Worked just fine :)

Does getgrav run on a php 7 server ?

Yep, and markedly faster than on 5.x.