[danielpetrica]

If you are building high-performance Laravel applications, you are likely already exploring the limits of what's possible with FrankenPHP and Laravel Octane. In my previous work designing a production-ready Laravel architecture with Traefik and FrankenPHP, I promoted this stack for its simplicity and raw power.

However, bleeding-edge tech often comes with bleeding-edge problems. Recently, I lost three hours debugging an issue that should have been obvious: The FrankenPHP binary installed by Laravel Octane is version-locked.

In my case, it was locked to PHP 8.4, despite my system running the latest stable PHP 8.5. If you are trying to upgrade your stack or build a high-performance directory like I did for LaraPlugins.io, you need your environment to match your expectations.

Here is how to force FrankenPHP to use PHP 8.5 and stop chasing ghost bugs.