Which Version of PHP Used for Magento?

The new version of the Magento e-commerce platform is the version v.2. The platform supports Nginx by default, however, there are some requirements and it must be optimized for better and smoother performance. PHP7 is the best suited version to run and accelerated the Magento software.

PHP7 is the latest and newly launched stable version after PHP 5.6. PHP6 was released in its beta version but never developed further. PHP7 can steer the online sites with numerous improvements. Almost all the popular CMS platforms like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal depend on the new PHP system.

Magento development will be a lot easier and simpler in addition to be faster with PHP7. It is estimated to double up the speed so far as performance is concerned. It is very effective and highly safe and secure from uninvited bugs and security breaches. However, PHP7 may not work smoothly with the earlier versions of Magento since the compatibility levels differ. For the earlier versions, i.e. Magento1.6 and 1.7, you require PHP versions of 5.2 and above.

The other Magento2 system requirements include

Composer – the PHP manager

Varnish- the HTTP accelerator

Redis- the key-value cache

MySQL- the important component of LAMP configuration. You need MySQL v5.6 or more.

PHPUnit and XDebug

PHP extensions like PDO/MySQL, mbstring, Mcrypt, mhash, SimpleXML, openssl, intl, soap, and more.

Hi,
Magento have released its v.2 version. Same PHP has released its v.7. As these both the latest version they are the best suit and compatible. I would Recommend that you use PHP v.7 for your Magento because with v.7 the Magento Development would be fast and simple.

For Magento 2.3
Supported PHP versions:
~7.1.3
~7.2.0
~7.3.0
also Magento 2.3.1 is certified and tested on PHP 7.2.11. Magento 2.3.3 adds support for PHP 7.3.

Technologies Magento can use
Version 5.0 is highly recommended. Magento 2.3 uses Elasticsearch PHP client version 6.1.