Report this

What is the reason for this report?

Recommended PHP version for up to date LEMP

Posted on September 19, 2014
igor

By igor

I am currently running Debian 7.6, PHP 5.4.4, Wordpress 4.0 and Nginx 1.2.1.

Should I install PHP 5.5 or 5.6? Neither seems to be available in the Debian repositories yet.

I don’t particularly want to break anything and I am not interested in extra labor, but then again, my droplet will have a lot more stuff on it in several months and now would be the time to upgrade PHP without danger of screwing up too many things.



This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.

Hi Igor,

According to the PHP release process, they will be bugs and security fixes until 1. March 2015.

Wordpress is know to keep BC and should work with PHP 5.5 / 5.6. I advice you to upgrade at least to php 5.5.

But be aware that you can have problems with some 3rd part plugins…

I would recommend installing PHP 5.6, since it will keep backwards compatibility and you should not have problems unless you are running really old stuff.

You can use this PPA. To add the PPA, run:

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

And then proceed with the web server installation.

ProTip: create a snapshot of your droplet, if you run into problems you can restore it to a new droplet.

The developer cloud

Scale up as you grow — whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.

Get started for free

Sign up and get $200 in credit for your first 60 days with DigitalOcean.*

*This promotional offer applies to new accounts only.