How to upgrade from PHP v.5.5.9 to v.5.6

September 30, 2014 222.4k views
stuehler
By:
stuehler

I just deployed a new droplet. By default, it’s set up with PHP 5.5.9. I would like to upgrade that to v.5.6.

How do I do this?

Thanks in advance.

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11 Answers
michaelpporter September 12, 2016

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install php5.6 php5.6-mbstring php5.6-mcrypt php5.6-mysql php5.6-xml
sudo a2dismod php5
sudo a2enmod php5.6
sudo service apache2 restart

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asb MOD September 30, 2014

To upgrade to a newer version of PHP 5.6 on Ubuntu 14.04, you can use Ondřej Surý’s PPA. He is one of the Debian maintainers of the php5 package. To add the PPA and upgrade your packages, run:

sudo apt-get install software-properties-common
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php5-5.6
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install php5

Though remember to be careful when doing an upgrade of PHP outside of the normal distro repositories, some of the additional modules that you might rely on could be missing for that version.

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  • stuehler September 30, 2014

    Thank you!

  • gekannt May 28, 2015

    thenks

  • FelixINX June 27, 2015

    Hi, Is it normal that on the phpinfo(); header we have PHP Version 5.6.10-1+deb.sury.org~trusty+1? It’s weird.

  • asb MOD June 29, 2015

    @FelixINX The header will display the full package version string. 5.6.10 is the upstream PHP version number while 1+deb.sury.org~trusty+1 is the Debian packaging version.

  • JeroenJK November 18, 2015

    Hi,

    After the second command I get the following error:

    UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc5 in position 92: ordinal not in range(128)

    This is something with the locales I guess.
    This is what I get when doing locale:

    locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=
LC_CTYPE=UTF-8
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

    I tried everything I can find, mainly about setting locales, but nothing seems to be the solution. I also tried it on Ubuntu 14.04 on the RaspberryPi, but it got the same problems.

    It would be great if you could help me with this!

    I am running Ubuntu 14.04 with Apache 2.4.7 (Apache/2.4.7 (Ubuntu)) and PHP 5.5.9 (PHP 5.5.9-1ubuntu4.5 (cli))

  • phillippanba977 June 23, 2016

    PPA has a new repository

    sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php5-5.6

    is being DEPRECATED. use

    sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php

    Also, when installing, use 

    sudo apt-get install php5.6 php5.6-fpm php5.6-xml ...
    • LeeChilli June 23, 2016

      Thanks have this installed, but my server is now using both 5.6 and 5.5, php info shows 5.5, is there anyway to get this to point to 5.6

  • francisrod01 June 23, 2016

    I do not install php5-mbstring.
    Help me please!

prasanthka01 April 8, 2017

sudo apt-get install software-properties-common
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y php5.6 php5.6-mcrypt php5.6-mbstring php5.6-curl php5.6-cli php5.6-mysql php5.6-gd php5.6-intl php5.6-xsl php5.6-zip libapache2-mod-php5.6

sudo a2dismod php5
sudo a2enmod php5.6
sudo service apache2 restart

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  • PJButterfield May 9, 2017

    Just wanted to say thank you, this was exactly what I needed as the original instructions were outdated.

  • scott99ttp April 19, 2019

    Thank you very much. As PJButterfield said, previous instructions seems to be outdated. I was getting a 500 error after the changes. With your instructions it worked perfectly :)

sdwarwick September 12, 2015

note that if you are using NGINX and not Apache, this needs to be changed to avoid apache being loaded as part of the install. According to the maintainer of the ppa, the correct approach is to replace

sudo apt-get install php5

with

sudo apt-get install php5 php5-fpm

in the provided sequence of commands

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webuxr July 13, 2016

I have an eCommerce site set-up and running on my DO droplet. I want to upgrade this software however, upgrade requirements state that I should also upgrade to PHP 5.6. While it’s not clear as to why this software now needs PHP 5.6, I did notice an issue with how my droplet reports which version of PHP it’s using.

I now see “PHP Version 5.6.23-1+deprecated+dontuse+deb.sury.org~trusty+1” when hitting my phpinfo.php page. However, when I invoke “php -v” on the command line, I see:
PHP 7.0.8-4+deb.sury.org~trusty+1 (cli) ( NTS ).

I believe 5.5.x, 5.6.x, and 7.0.x versions of PHP can all live together on the same server, how do I ensure Apache is serving up my site with a non-deprecated version of PHP 5.6?

Please note that phpinfo shows my loaded configuration file is /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini so that seems correct.

LAMP stack versions:

  • Ubuntu 14.04.4 LTS (GNU/Linux 4.4.0-28-generic x86_64)
  • Apache 2.4.7
  • MySQL 14.14 Distrib 5.5.49, for debian-linux-gnu (x86_64) using readline 6.3
  • PHP 7.0.8-4+deb.sury.org~trusty+1 (cli) ( NTS ) Copyright © 1997-2016 The PHP Group Zend Engine v3.0.0, Copyright © 1998-2016 Zend Technologies with Zend OPcache v7.0.8-4+deb.sury.org~trusty+1

Is there an easier way to enforce which version of PHP my server utilizes?

Thank you,
_rs

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toimisto June 26, 2017

I followed your instructions but keep getting
E: Couldn’t find any package by regex ‘php5.6’

How to fix this?

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ajbird4 August 7, 2016

I have followed this guide but seem to have run into problems:

I did the following:

sudo apt-get install software-properties-common
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install php5.6

Now what seems to have happened is when I check phpinfo.php it is using 5.5.9 but the cli is using 5.6.24

When I use composer install, It seems all my extensions (intl, mbstring, zip etc..) are not installed. I am a bit lost and would really appreciate any advice :-)

Thanks

Aaron

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  • Annapurna September 8, 2016

    I have the same problem. phpinfo() shows the previous version of installed php, but php -v in terminal shows the latest one. Did you get a solution to it?

flesh September 27, 2016
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jfergt November 9, 2016

I am using NGINX but in the info.php the version is: 5.5.9

and in the cli I have: php-fpm5.6 and php-fpm
¿how do I choose the correct version to load with nginx?

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  • marcelobentodarocha January 8, 2017

    I’m facing the same problem. Could anyone help?

    • jasonhoward7 January 9, 2017

      First, be sure to run:

      sudo apt-get install php5.6-fpm

      Then, in your nginx site config file (here: /etc/nginx/sites-available), change

                  fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;

      to

                  fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php5.6-fpm.sock;

      This is of course, assuming that your info.php is in the same directory as your root site files as configured in the nginx site config file.

tgs19g January 10, 2017

I have a problem as I updated my php version to 5.6 from 5.5.
Server:

  • OS: Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS.
  • Server version: Apache/2.4.7 (Ubuntu).
  • PHP version: 5.5.
  • Laravel 4.2 with yajra package.

I have done the following steps:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install php5.6 php5.6-mbstring php5.6-mcrypt php5.6-mysql php5.6-xml
sudo a2dismod php5
sudo a2enmod php5.6
sudo service apache2 restart

After that, I checked oci8 extensions:

cat /etc/php5/cli/php.ini | grep extension=oci8 => exists
cat /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini | grep extension=oci8 => exists

But the following errors occurs when I load my web on the browser.
2017-01-09 20:13:54] production.ERROR: exception ‘Symfony\Component\Debug\Exception\FatalErrorException’ with message 'Call to undefined function Yajra\Pdo\oci_connect()’ in /var/www/****/vendor/yajra/laravel-pdo-via-oci8/src/Pdo/Oci8.php:449

How to solve this problem? Is there any idea, please…

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jaragaojunior January 11, 2017

I’m using NGINX and I’m facing this problem too

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