Our current images are built on Debian Jessie (aka 8/oldstable). Ideally we should have already completed the update to Stretch (aka 9/stable), but unfortunately we're running a bit behind schedule.

I'm not sure if you're aware of how most Linux distros operate, but generally , only the latest OS release provides the latest versions of upstream software. That's why PHP and others on TurnKey v14.2 are somewhat older versions. Once we finalise the next release (v15.0) we'll have PHP 7.0. Older OS releases (which are still supported) will get security updates, but instead of updating the version of the software, security fixes are backported.

That provides a significantly more stable OS (no more changes than required), whilst still being secure. Whilst PHP 5.6 reaches official end of life in December 2018, Debian Jessie is an LTS release and will get security updates until at least April 2020. Even if upstream stop supporting it, there are a few distros that will continue support for PHP5.6 such has Red Hat, CentOS, Ubuntu and Debian, so no doubt they will pool resources to keep on top of it.

Magento itself is a slightly different story. We install that direct from upstream. It is likely a little out of date, as it was last updated a while ago. But it should be version 2.1 at least!? Actually, according to the build code, it should contain 2.1.7!? If that's not the case, perhaps you have an older version? You can check what TurnKey version you have with this command:

turnkey-version

We have also been considering whether to use Nginx for some of our appliances, or whether to stick with Apache. I was primed to swap as many to Nginx as we could, but one of our hosting partners did some extensive testing and demonstrated that simply swapping out Apache for Nginx wouldn't make any human noticeable difference, except on extremely low resource machines. I'm still tempted to run a few on Nginx, but we'll need to see...

As far as tweaking and building images is concerned, if you download yourself a copy of TKLDev then you can tinker to your heart's content! :)

By default, you can rebuild on the current base (v14.2) but please be aware that if you do that, then you'll need make sure to check out the individual appliance code at the 14.2 tag. That's because many of the appliances have already been updated for v15.0 so if you just build from master, it will likely fail. If you wish to test building a v15.0 image, then please have a look at this gist.

Hopefully that's enough to get you going. Please post back if you need more pointers or wish to report your progress. I'd love to hear how you go. I'm always particularly interested in any pain points you may encounter. If there is something we can do to make things smoother in the future, we love to know about that! :)