What's New in Magento 2.4.8 (LATEST RELEASE 2025)

If your Magento store still runs on PHP 8.1, you've got a problem. If you want to upgrade to the latest version, Magento 2.4.8 completely drops support for PHP 8.1, and that's just the beginning of these changes. This version makes a hard push towards PHP 8.3, with PHP 8.2 kept around only as a compatibility bridge. It's also likely the last time you'll see PHP 8.2 supported in a new Magento release, but that's not even the biggest shift. They're completely removing Elasticsearch support in favor of OpenSearch, which means that there will be a mandatory search engine migration for tens of thousands of stores over the next few minutes. I'll walk you through the most impactful changes in Magento 2.4.8 that will affect your development, workflow, server configurations, and store performance. Let's get right to it. The new PHP version requirements affect everything else that you'll DO in Magento 2.4.8. Looking back at Magento 2.47. While the official system requirements noted that it only supports PHP 8.2 and 8.3, it actually also supported PHP 8.1 for compatibility reasons. This provided agencies and merchants some extra time to upgrade to PHP 8.2. Similarly, this is exactly what's happening with Magento 248. So while Adobe is strongly pushing for PHP 8.3 adoption, as am I, you can in Fact still use PHP 8.2 as a bridge to get upgraded and and work on your code updates. This is a great workflow that I strongly support, as it'll give agencies and merchants time to upgrade while at the same time urging you to upgrade to a better supported version. PHP 8.3 brings along with it not only a few new features such as type class constants, the new override attribute, a new JSON validate function, and some new classes and functions, but also a few deprecations and breaking changes. So be sure to compare all of your custom Magento code updates against these updates to get your site prepped for full PHP 8.3 compatibility. But some big news here is that Magento 248 will also support PHP 8.4. This major update includes so many new features including property hooks, asymmetric visibility, a new DOM API, the bcMath number object for better math, for precision numbers and and new array search functions. If you'd like to learn more about this new functionality, just click that link above to check out my PHP 8.4 core features playlist, which is available for free at Macademy. Moving on to database compatibility, Magento 248 now supports MySQL 8.4 which has long term support until April of 2032, as well as MariaDB 11.4 with support through May of 2029. This is an important update as older versions like MySQL 8.0 and MariaDB 10.6 are approaching end of life, so this is a critical upgrade for long term stability. A key database change was a switch from UTF8MB3 to MB4 collation. This encoding upgrades from 3 byte to 4 byte encoding which supports a wider range of Unicode characters including emoji, special symbols and more characters from various languages. A major platform upgrade is a complete shift from Elasticsearch to OpenSearch back in 2021, Elasticsearch changed its licensing to the ELV2 license, which prohibited it being offered as a managed service. This threw a bit of a wrench into projects like Adobe Commerce Cloud and Amazon Web Services, and The latter forked Elasticsearch into a new offering called OpenSearch. To make this story even more interesting, Elastic once again added an open source license back to Elasticsearch back in August of 2024, this time being the license of AGPL. That said, OpenSearch seemed to already gain quite a bit of momentum and market share since and many vendors like AWS decided to continue to roll with it. The admin UI will now also include notifications guiding users to switch to OpenSearch and the search configuration settings have been updated to reflect this change. With regards to developer tooling, PHP unit has also been upgraded from version 9 to 10. This new version essentially makes all output based on a new event system. This update required some fairly involved and large changes to testing code which makes them more reliable and accurate. If you write unit tests for your Magento code, you'll want to review and update your suites to ensure that they are fully compatible with PHP unit 10. Magento 248 also includes several updates to core libraries and including Monologue 3, less PHP5 and new versions of jQuery, Validate and Moment JS. These updates will help to eliminate potential vulnerabilities with older versions and also make JavaScript code more performant. There have been numerous fixes to the REST API layer of Magento 2, 4, 8, including the transactions endpoint which caused transaction ID errors. The platform will also now handle requests with a slash in the sku when using OAuth one of an edge case, but it was a pain point with those with complex product identifiers. Magento did release multiple patches for 247, and one of them that made its way into the core of 248 is a new encryption key rotation process. This functionality used to be handled in the admin, but has now been moved entirely to the command line, which makes things more secure and able to be modified if required. If you're building custom front ends or progressive web apps on top of Magento, the GraphQL updates in 2.4.8 will definitely make your life a bit easier. The GraphQL layer now supports custom scalar types, which provides better handling in some of those complex data type scenarios such as HTML and URLs. For example, if you've been working with rich product descriptions that contain HTML, you can now get and manipulate this content much more efficiently. This makes it easier for you to build those custom UIs without having to resort to any kind of hacks or custom workarounds that contain additional parsing logic because that type is now native to the platform. Remember to give this video a thumbs up if you liked it so far. The GraphQL API now also supports sorting products by multiple fields. This allows you to have much more control over how products show up in things like search results and category pages, and it gives you some additional sorting capabilities without having to implement something custom. Magenta 248 also comes with better cache management for resolvers. The system now automatically invalidates caches for GraphQL resolvers when customer data is updated through imports. This makes sure info is always up to date and prevents situations where users may see outdated data after making updates in the backend. And while we're at it, if you'd like to learn everything that you need to work with and develop custom endpoints, even if you know nothing about GraphQL, be sure to check out my course The Art of GraphQL in Magento 2. This course will allow you to become intricately familiar with the GraphQL layer in Magento, including learning all about the related terminology like schemas, queries, mutations, resolvers, fragments and more. GraphQL is becoming increasingly important with the rise of SaaS offerings and headless storefronts like Adobe Commerce Cloud and different PWA offerings, as well as all of the changes happening lately in the AI landscape, such as the growing popularity of MCPs and AI agents. So be sure to check out this course as it's a skill that will make you indispensable moving forward. And if you don't yet have a solid understanding of the Magento 2 architecture and programming fundamentals you'll absolutely want to check out my Magento 2 coding kickstart course, which lays the foundation for everything else in the platform. Performance is always important for e commerce sites, and Magento 248 includes several optimizations that can really improve your store's loading times. These performance improvements are huge and they can mean a difference between something like a 2% and 3% conversion rate during holiday traffic spikes. I have noticed the performance gains of Magento 248 firsthand and the site really seems to fly. There have been some updates made to queries when retrieving products, cross sells and upsells, which will really help for stores with high volumes or with a large number of products or product configurations. Additionally, 248 comes with improved caching of product data, which will minimize the number of queries that even need to be made and will speed up your site. An interesting change that could have significant performance implications is the new default indexer mode. Magento always defaulted these indexes to update on save, but this has been changed to update by schedule. This essentially queues up indexes to be updated in the background rather than being immediately applied after every change. This could help the system from being overwhelmed during large imports or catalog updates and ensures the system will have consistent performance even when there are periods of crazy admin updates going on. So you should experience a pretty notable improvement in performance, especially on mobile. But again, I've noticed it myself and 248 really seems to fly. This is because in addition to these product caching and query updates, the updated require JS library will now initialize JavaScript scripts much quicker. Order processing speed continues to improve as well as additional updates now make handling orders much more efficient through their fulfillment cycle. There have also been some updates made to the REST API layer as it is now able to handle tier price updates much more efficiently, which will help out any B2B merchant or those dealing with complex pricing structures which rely on frequent updates. The API can now also handle bulk pricing changes without slowing down, which could have happened in previous versions. Security is always a top notch priority in Magento and 2.4.8 is no exception. Cross site scripting or XSS attacks remain one of the most common threats to web apps, and this version includes a patch which addresses a few potential XSS vulnerabilities. These fixes help to prevent harmful scripts from being injected into your site, which protects both your admin users and customers. Remote code execution vulnerabilities have also been addressed, closing some potential loopholes that could allow some bad actors to execute unauthorized code on your server. These security improvements are absolutely critical when it comes to protecting sensitive cardholder data. I want to take a moment to say that there's a good chance that these vulnerabilities were caught just due to the open source nature of Magento. Those SaaS E Commerce servers sitting behind closed doors in a black box, who knows what that code looks like? And hackers still can make their way through that code, allowing vulnerabilities to potentially go undiscovered for weeks, months or even years. Yes, this can happen open source as well, but since that code is out in the open, it has a much higher likelihood of being caught and reported than a site sitting on a black box. SaaS by having that code in the open, it does expose all of its vulnerabilities, but that's a good thing when it comes to security, especially with commerce. This is one of the many reasons why I continue to favor open source platforms over SaaS offerings, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. And if you'd like to learn how to protect the open source ecosystem, please check out the Open Source initiative. I popped a link to it down below and let me make one small change right now. Yep, it's mageos. Well, I still love Magento, but it's great to have an initiative like Mageos around that to help support open source initiatives. And if you want an LED like this, it's pretty awesome. You can get it over at magedispatch. I'll leave a link to it in the description below. And while it does look great in my videos, it's really a hundred times better in person. Comes with a cool admin panel where you can change around the animations and the colors. It's really awesome and it really makes for a great background in zoom calls, so be sure to check it out. Getting back to it As I mentioned before, require JS has been upgraded to 2.3.7, which resolves several other vulnerabilities related to arbitrary code execution in denial of service attacks or DOS attacks. Prototype JS has also been upgraded to address potential security vulnerabilities related to regular expression based denial of service attacks or redos attacks. These types of attacks attempt to exploit inefficient regular expression processing, which allows attackers to consume server resources and potentially also cause other service disruptions. As I mentioned earlier, encryption key management has moved from the admin UI to KLI commands in Magento248. This change provides a more secure and reliable way to manage encryption keys, particularly for deployment pipelines and multi server environments. The new CLI based approach also eliminates some bugs that existed in the UI based implementation and offers better control over this critical security component for stores that use two factor authentication. Duo Security 2 FA has been updated to Web SDK version 4 and the one time password settings have been also refined which enhances some security. Relatedly, Adobe Commerce Cloud also merged in an update that I've been waiting for for a long time and that's installing non dev dependencies only on deployments. This should now also allow you to install my popular disabled 2fa module along with any other modules that you wish as dev dependencies and not have them automatically triggered as a security vulnerability or included in deploys. All of these updates help to ensure that Magento remains compliant with security standards like PCI DSS and and also help to provide some peace of mind to merchants and devs who need to protect sensitive data from increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks. Speaking of, I found it Interesting that PCI DSS, a new security standard, just got released on March 31, about a week before Magento 248 released, so this should provide you with an additional level of contentment knowing that Magento has had much time to prepare its code against this new standard and it's now completely in line with all of the current security requirements. Moving on to front end updates, the Google Maps API received an update and TinyMCE has been upgraded to 7.3. This brings with it a more user friendly what you see is what you get editor, including the addition of font size and family selectors, which makes it easier to style content directly from the editor and this reduces the need to have custom HTML edits within your content blocks. The admin also received some updates for improved UI elements and customer facing forms have also been improved with various validation of customer address forms. This reduces the likelihood of errors happening when either checking out or creating a customer count, which should lead to a few less abandoned carts. And before I forget, Docker, Magento was also just updated for full Magento 248 support. This includes a runtime for PHP 8.4 as well as other dependencies needed to get this version up and running and fully compatible with the latest version. Magento 248 brings with it several improvements to payment gateway integration, particularly with Braintree, and it has been enhanced with a few new features. First, shipping options are now available directly in the PayPal modal, which allows customers to select their preferred shipping method without leaving the payment flow package Tracking support has also been added, which lets merchants automatically sync shipment tracking info with PayPal. This helps keep customers informed about their order status directly through PayPal notifications, which helps reduce customer support issues related to them checking up with you for tracking status updates. Line item displays in Apple Pay and Google Pay have also been improved, providing customers with more detailed information about their purchases during the checkout process. This transparency helps build trust and also reduces confusion about what exactly customers are paying for at the checkout. A couple B2B specific enhancements include fixes for shared catalog visibility as well as negotiable rates now being available in GraphQL. The REST API has also been updated to account for order comment status changes aligning with the current order state, which will fix some inconsistencies that occur when updating orders through the API Cart coupon code logic has also been improved which addresses issues which could cause some unexpected behavior to occur when applying or removing discount codes. Solid Magento update, right? Well, did you know that you can install Magento in just a few minutes? Check out this next video where I show you how to install Magento 248 in just 5 minutes using docker and be sure to give this video a like and subscribe to my channel if you'd like to get notified anytime I put out a new video. And until next time, keep coding.