Requirements

One-liner: PHP 8.0–8.5 (minus the broken 8.2.0–8.2.8 range), ext-curl always, ext-soap/ext-xml only if you use the SOAP hook.

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PHP

^8.0,<8.2 | >=8.2.9,<8.6

That is: PHP 8.0, 8.1, 8.3, 8.4, 8.5 — and 8.2 only from patch 8.2.9 onward (earlier 8.2.x patches have a known incompatibility). CI runs the full matrix across every supported version, on both lowest and highest allowed dependency versions.

Extensions

Extension	Required	Why
curl	Always	Used both by the curl hook and internally to perform real HTTP requests when recording.
soap	Only for the soap hook	SoapHook throws BadMethodCallException at construction if SoapClient doesn't exist.
xml (ext-dom)	Only for the soap hook	Same constructor check, via DOMDocument.

If you never use SoapClient in your codebase, you can skip ext-soap/ext-xml entirely — the soap hook is simply never constructed unless something asks for it.

Dependencies

Composer installs all of these for you:

• symfony/event-dispatcher — powers Events.
• symfony/yaml — the default storage backend.
• beberlei/assert — internal input validation.

Tested HTTP libraries

php-vcr intercepts at the level of PHP's stream wrapper and curl_*/SoapClient functions, so it works with any library built on top of them — these are the ones actually exercised by the test suite:

Library	Hook	Notes
file_get_contents(), fopen(), fread(), …	stream_wrapper	Any function that goes through PHP's http/https stream wrapper.
Symfony\Component\HttpClient\NativeHttpClient	stream_wrapper	Uses stream wrappers under the hood.
ext-curl (curl_init/curl_exec/curl_multi_*/…)	curl	Direct curl function calls.
Symfony\Component\HttpClient\CurlHttpClient	curl	Symfony's curl-backed client.
Guzzle (curl handler)	curl	Guzzle's default transport on most installs.
SoapClient (built-in or a subclass)	soap	Both direct instantiation and custom extends SoapClient classes.

See Library Hooks for how each hook actually intercepts these, and How VCR works for the underlying mechanism.

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