Skip to content
BOA Documentation

Powered by Grav

Drupal 12 readiness

Drupal 12 readiness

Drupal 12 is due in the second week of December 2026, in the same week Drupal 10 reaches its end of life. This page is the short version of what that means for a BOA box, written for the person who has to decide what to do about it this autumn. The dates and requirements come from the Drupal project's own release schedule and PHP requirements pages, checked on 2026-09-18; treat them as the project's plan, not a promise, and re-check the schedule before you pin a date on your own calendar.

The dates that matter

When What the Drupal project has announced
Week of 7 December 2026 Drupal 12.0.0 and Drupal 11.5.0 are released
9 December 2026 Drupal 10 reaches end of life. Security support for 11.3.x and 10.6.x ends the same week
After Drupal 13 Drupal 11 stays supported until Drupal 13 has shipped; no Drupal 13 date is set, and the project's two-year, even-year major cadence puts it in 2028

Two consequences follow. A site on Drupal 10 has under three months of security coverage left as this page is written, and the newest Drupal 10 minor stops receiving fixes the week Drupal 12 appears. A site on Drupal 11 is in no hurry at all: 11.5 arrives with 12.0, and the 11.x line keeps going for years.

What Drupal 12 needs, and what BOA already has

  • PHP 8.5 is the minimum for Drupal 12. Drupal 11 runs on 8.3 and newer. BOA has shipped PHP 8.5 in its default set since BOA-5.8.5 (December 2025), alongside 8.4 (the default CLI and FPM version) and 8.3, and every site picks its own version with the per-site PHP switch — see Choosing a PHP version. A box upgraded through the normal barracuda up-* pair already has 8.5 installed; nothing to order, nothing to compile.
  • Password hashing. From Drupal 12 the project expects PHP with argon2 support, which the project notes is the case on normal PHP 8.5 builds. BOA's PHP is built from source with that support; no action.
  • MySQL 8, which on BOA means Percona 8.4. Drupal 11 already needs it, so a box that runs Drupal 11 sites today is ready on the database side; a box still on Percona 5.7 is not, for Drupal 11 and 12 alike. The two-step move and the snapshot-first rule are in Keeping current.
  • The Drupal 7 exit stays on Drupal 11. Drupal 12 removes the Migrate Drupal and Migrate Drupal UI core modules (deprecated in Drupal 11; the project's change record is The Migrate Drupal module is deprecated). A Drupal 7 site that still has to be migrated with core's own tooling therefore migrates onto a Drupal 11 platform, which stays supported for years; it does not wait for 12. BOA's workflow for that is Migrating a Drupal 7 site to Drupal CMS, and the other exit, Backdrop, is on Leaving Drupal 7.
  • Release packages without test files. The Drupal project plans to leave core's automated tests out of the packaged Drupal 12 release (issue #3067979). That changes nothing for a site, but a patch that also touches test files no longer applies to a packaged core; the patches BOA carries in its tested codebases are re-rolled for that when the Drupal 12 platforms are built.

What BOA will do, and when

BOA's platforms are built from tested codebases, never from a release the day it appears. A Drupal 12 platform joins the built set once the release is out and has been through the same build-and-install test every core and distribution goes through (see Building the test-codebase mirror for how that mirror is made). Until then the newest platforms are the Drupal 11 ones, which is also where the Drupal project itself tells a Drupal 10 site to go now rather than in December.

The move itself, when the platform exists, is the ordinary one: a Migrate Site task onto the newer platform, rehearsed on a clone first, with the site's PHP version switched to 8.5 on that clone before the real move.

What to do this autumn

  1. Drupal 10 sites: move them to a Drupal 11 platform now, on a clone first. The Drupal project's guidance is the same, and the work carries over to the Drupal 12 move later.
  2. A Percona 5.7 box that will host Drupal 11 or 12: plan the two-step database move with a snapshot, and run codebasecheck --box --deep first (Percona 8 readiness).
  3. Drupal 11 sites: nothing. Keep SKYNET on and let the 11.x updates land.
  4. A site on a Drupal 7 platform: pick its exit on Leaving Drupal 7; both roads are open today and neither depends on Drupal 12.

© 2026 BOA Documentation. All rights reserved.