Today, WordPress announced it is dropping PHP 5.6 support, raising the minimum supported version to PHP 7.0 for WordPress 6.3.0.

https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/07/05/dropping-support-for-php-5/

Changeset 56141 dropped the PHP 5.6 CI jobs.

After the changeset was committed, Gutenberg's CI started failing on each of the PHP 5.6 jobs (e.g. PR #52343) with the following error message:

Your server is running PHP version 5.6.39 but WordPress 6.3-beta3-56142 requires at least 7.0.0.

What is your proposed solution?

To keep parity with WordPress Core, this ticket proposes for Gutenberg to:

• Raise the minimum support PHP version.
• Drop the PHP 5.6 CI jobs.

Tasks

1. Drop PHP 5.6 CI jobs running on WordPress trunk.
2. Get consensus on when to raise the minimum required PHP version.
3. Change the plugin header Requires PHP: to 7.0.