Agent installation should fail when PHP version is unsupported

[rvanlaak]

The NR PHP Agent installation silently continues if an unsupported version of PHP is found and NR_INSTALL_SILENT is provided.

Summary

Builds nowadays are being done unattended via CI pipelines. Not failing on unsupported installations leads to getting unmonitored instances.

On runtime in the container it will not be visible anymore that the installation failed, as logs are part of the pipeline output and not part of the built image. Not failing leads to problems when devops needs to debug why alerting stopped working.

Desired Behavior

By default the installer should fail on installations for unsupported PHP versions.

Possible Solution

By default fail on installations for unsupported PHP versions, but to be sort-of BC consider adding a feature flag on the CLI installation command to still allow silently continuing (e.g. newrelic-install install --continue-on-unsupported) for ones that would need this (no idea why you would want this).

Additional context

This is a follow-up of this comment in the thread around adding PHP 8.2 support.

[rvanlaak]

Silently failing agent installation is painful for anyone using CI build pipelines. Any feedback on this?

[rvanlaak]

The PHP 8.3 release process is ongoing, which will mean that NewRelic customers that keep their PHP versions up-to-date will lose NewRelic monitoring without being informed about this by a failing build pipeline. Any update on a fix for this issue?