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How to update PHP version to 8.3 on a droplet?

Posted on August 2, 2025

I have a digitalocean droplet that I use for hosting a wordpress blog. I got a message on my Wordpress dashboard that my PHP is outdated and that I should update it to at least PHP 8.3. How to do that?

I’m not proficient in server administration but I can use the command line. Please guide me.



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Heya,

PHP 8.3 may not be available in the default Ubuntu repositories, so you’ll need to add the ondrej/php PPA to get the latest PHP version.

Run the following commands to add the PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php
sudo apt update

After adding the repository, you can install PHP 8.3 and some common PHP extensions for WordPress. Run the following command:

sudo apt install php8.3 php8.3-cli php8.3-fpm php8.3-mysql php8.3-xml php8.3-mbstring php8.3-curl php8.3-zip

If you’re using PHP-FPM with Nginx, restart the PHP-FPM service to apply the update:

sudo systemctl restart php8.3-fpm

If you already have an older PHP version installed (e.g., PHP 7.x), you can switch between PHP versions using the update-alternatives command.

To set PHP 8.3 as the default version for your CLI and web server (e.g., Apache or Nginx), run:

sudo update-alternatives --set php /usr/bin/php8.3
sudo update-alternatives --set phpize /usr/bin/phpize8.3
sudo update-alternatives --set php-config /usr/bin/php-config8.3

After updating PHP, restart your web server to make sure it uses the new PHP version.

sudo systemctl restart nginx

Heya, @1ddffddc31ea402a842dcb134f6134

As a side note, you can check which are the currently installed PHP packages for the current PHP version and make sure all these packages will be installed for PHP 8.3 as well

The PHP packages for WordPress are:

sudo apt install php8.3 php8.3-cli php8.3-fpm php8.3-mysql php8.3-curl php8.3-xml php8.3-mbstring php8.3-gd php8.3-zip php8.3-bcmath php8.3-intl -y

Hope that this helps!

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