Tutorial

How To Upgrade to PHP 7 on Ubuntu 14.04

Published on December 16, 2015

Introduction

PHP 7, which was released on December 3, 2015, promises substantial speed improvements over previous versions of the language, along with new features like scalar type hinting. This guide explains how to quickly upgrade an Apache or Nginx web server running PHP 5.x (any release) to PHP 7.

Warning: As with most major-version language releases, it’s best to wait a little while before switching to PHP 7 in production. In the meanwhile, it’s a good time to test your applications for compatibility with the new release, perform benchmarks, and familiarize yourself with new language features.

If you’re running any services or applications with active users, it is safest to first test this process in a staging environment.

Prerequisites

This guide assumes that you are running PHP 5.x on an Ubuntu 14.04 machine, using either mod_php in conjunction with Apache, or PHP-FPM in conjunction with Nginx. It also assumes that you have a non-root user configured with sudo privileges for administrative tasks.

Adding a PPA for PHP 7.0 Packages

A Personal Package Archive, or PPA, is an Apt repository hosted on Launchpad. PPAs allow third-party developers to build and distribute packages for Ubuntu outside of the official channels. They’re often useful sources of beta software, modified builds, and backports to older releases of the operating system.

Ondřej Surý maintains the PHP packages for Debian, and offers a PPA for PHP 7.0 on Ubuntu. Before doing anything else, log in to your system, and add Ondřej’s PPA to the system’s Apt sources:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php

You’ll see a description of the PPA, followed by a prompt to continue. Press Enter to proceed.

Note: If your system’s locale is set to anything other than UTF-8, adding the PPA may fail due to a bug handling characters in the author’s name. As a workaround, you can install language-pack-en-base to make sure that locales are generated, and override system-wide locale settings while adding the PPA:

sudo apt-get install -y language-pack-en-base
sudo LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php

Once the PPA is installed, update the local package cache to include its contents:

sudo apt-get update

Now that we have access to packages for PHP 7.0, we can replace the existing PHP installation.

Upgrading `mod_php` with Apache

This section describes the upgrade process for a system using Apache as the web server and mod_php to execute PHP code. If, instead, you are running Nginx and PHP-FPM, skip ahead to the next section.

First, install the new packages. This will upgrade all of the important PHP packages, with the exception of php5-mysql, which will be removed.

sudo apt-get install php7.0

Note: If you have made substantial modifications to any configuration files in /etc/php5/, those files are still in place, and can be referenced. Configuration files for PHP 7.0 now live in /etc/php/7.0.

If you are using MySQL, make sure to re-add the updated PHP MySQL bindings:

sudo apt-get install php7.0-mysql

Upgrading PHP-FPM with Nginx

This section describes the upgrade process for a system using Nginx as the web server and PHP-FPM to execute PHP code.

First, install the new PHP-FPM package and its dependencies:

sudo apt-get install php7.0-fpm

You’ll be prompted to continue. Press Enter to complete the installation.

If you are using MySQL, be sure to re-install the PHP MySQL bindings:

sudo apt-get install php7.0-mysql

Updating Nginx Site(s) to Use New Socket Path

Nginx communicates with PHP-FPM using a Unix domain socket. Sockets map to a path on the filesystem, and our PHP 7 installation uses a new path by default:

PHP 5	PHP 7
/var/run/php5-fpm.sock	/var/run/php/php7.0-fpm.sock

Open the default site configuration file with nano (or your editor of choice):

sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default

Your configuration may differ somewhat. Look for a block beginning with location ~ \.php$ {, and a line that looks something like fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;. Change this to use unix:/var/run/php/php7.0-fpm.sock.

/etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default

server {
    listen 80 default_server;
    listen [::]:80 default_server ipv6only=on;

    root /var/www/html;
    index index.php index.html index.htm;

    server_name server_domain_name_or_IP;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
    }

    error_page 404 /404.html;
    error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html;
    location = /50x.html {
        root /usr/share/nginx/html;
    }

    location ~ \.php$ {
        try_files $uri =404;
        fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
        fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php7.0-fpm.sock;
        fastcgi_index index.php;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        include fastcgi_params;
    }
}

Exit and save the file. In nano, you can accomplish this by pressing Ctrl-X to exit, y to confirm, and Enter to confirm the filename to overwrite.

You should repeat this process for any other virtual sites defined in /etc/nginx/sites-enabled which need to support PHP.

Now we can restart nginx:

sudo service nginx restart

Testing PHP

With a web server configured and the new packages installed, we should be able to verify that PHP is up and running. Begin by checking the installed version of PHP at the command line:

php -v

OutputPHP 7.0.0-5+deb.sury.org~trusty+1 (cli) ( NTS )
Copyright (c) 1997-2015 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v3.0.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2015 Zend Technologies
    with Zend OPcache v7.0.6-dev, Copyright (c) 1999-2015, by Zend Technologies

You can also create a test file in the web server’s document root. Depending on your server and configuration, this may be one of:

/var/www/html
/var/www/
/usr/share/nginx/html

Using nano, open a new file called info.php in the document root. By default, on Apache, this would be:

sudo nano /var/www/html/info.php

On Nginx, you might instead use:

sudo nano /usr/share/nginx/html/info.php

Paste the following code:

info.php

<?php
phpinfo();
?>

Exit the editor, saving info.php. Now, load the following address in your browser:

http://server_domain_name_or_IP/info.php

You should see PHP version and configuration info for PHP 7. Once you’ve double-checked this, it’s safest to to delete info.php:

sudo rm /var/www/html/info.php

Conclusion

You now have a working PHP 7 installation. From here, you may want to check out Erika Heidi’s Getting Ready for PHP 7 blog post, and look over the official migration guide.

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Brennen Bearnes

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bojanrnr • December 16, 2015

Doesn’t work for me on Ubuntu 14.04.3 & Nginx 1.9.7…

I’ve added the PPA and updated the package cache, but got this when trying to install php7.0-fpm:

apt-get install php7.0-fpm

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 php7.0-fpm : Depends: php7.0-cli but it is not going to be installed
              Depends: php7.0-common (>= 7.0.0-6+deb.sury.org~trusty+1) but it is not going to be installed
              Depends: php7.0-json but it is not going to be installed
              Depends: php7.0-opcache but it is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

I tried to install them all, but I keep getting more dependencies and conflicts

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 php7.0-cli : Recommends: php-readline but it is not installable
              Breaks: php5-cli but 5.5.30+dfsg-1+deb.sury.org~trusty+1 is to be installed
 php7.0-common : Conflicts: php5-common but 5.5.30+dfsg-1+deb.sury.org~trusty+1 is to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

kaska • December 19, 2015

@bojanrnr I received similar messages. I ran sudo apt-get remove php5-common and then ran from the top of this page again

adamwaatson • December 21, 2015

Have you tried this? http://askubuntu.com/questions/705880/how-to-install-php-7 Purging first, then installing all the PHP packages

Desired Persona • December 16, 2015

@bojanrnr i had same issue but i used the following command to remove PHP 5.6 first

sudo apt-get -y purge php5

478bc8bb12a64cdea3813e3016f836 • December 16, 2015

I can get PHP 7 running on Ubuntu 14.04 with Nginx, but I can’t get phpmyadmin installed even using the latest version because php-gettext and php-seclib are missing from the PHP 7 install. HAs anyone gotten phpmyadmin to work and willing to post directions?

Brennen Bearnes

DigitalOcean Employee

• December 31, 2015

See my comment here.

benrebla the man • January 25, 2017

thank’s

Desired Persona • December 16, 2015

Got the following error after installing php7.0-mcrypt. Anyone have a solution?

PHP Warning:  Module 'mcrypt' already loaded in Unknown on line 0

Brennen Bearnes

DigitalOcean Employee

• December 16, 2015

This rings a bell. I suspect that mcrypt is already compiled in.

You can kill the error by commenting extension=mcrypt.so in /etc/php/mods-available/mcrypt.ini (which should cover both the CLI and FPM SAPIs), like so:

root@lempet2:/etc/php/mods-available# cat mcrypt.ini 
; configuration for php mcrypt module
; priority=20
;extension=mcrypt.so

Even after doing this, it shows up in the list of compiled modules:

root@lempet2:/etc/php/mods-available# php -m | grep mcrypt
mcrypt

That said, there’s obviously still a problem here if code doesn’t work. I do notice that some mcrypt_* functions seem to have been deprecated in this release.

Desired Persona • December 17, 2015

@bpb Thanks Brennen

jmaes97 • December 18, 2015

Thank you for writing this article.

I’m getting a 500 error code after following the tutorial with a LAMP on Ubuntu 14.04. Replicated every step perfectly but it seems like PHP7 and MySQL won’t work together. Any ideas?

Brennen Bearnes

DigitalOcean Employee

• December 18, 2015

You mention MySQL, so I’m guessing you have some log output pointing that direction? Could you paste any specific errors you’re seeing from /var/log/apache2/error.log?

Dimitri Acosta • December 18, 2015

I thought the socket path was like this:

/run/php/php7.0-fpm.sock;

Brennen Bearnes

DigitalOcean Employee

• December 18, 2015

Interesting. Looks like /var/run symlinks to /run. I confess I haven’t really followed this change, but it sounds like /run has been canonical (or headed that way) for the major distros for a while now.

Thanks for the note. I’ll do a bit of further reading and update the instructions.

Dimitri Acosta • December 19, 2015

I saw that when I was looking into the /etc/php/7.0/fpm/pool.d/www.conf file.

robinwilson • December 22, 2015

I have just tested this and it refuses to work for me and just goes around in circles with unmet dependencies.

Trying to run this:

sudo apt-get install php7.0

Results in:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 php7.0 : Depends: libapache2-mod-php7.0 (>= 7.0.1-2+deb.sury.org~wily+1~) but it is not going to be installed or
                   php7.0-cgi (>= 7.0.1-2+deb.sury.org~wily+1~) but it is not going to be installed or
                   php7.0-fpm (>= 7.0.1-2+deb.sury.org~wily+1~) but it is not going to be installed
          Depends: php7.0-common (= 7.0.1-2+deb.sury.org~wily+1) but it is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

So then I try to install libapache2-mod-php7.0 and get a different unmet dependency:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 libapache2-mod-php7.0 : Depends: php7.0-cli but it is not going to be installed
                         Depends: php7.0-common (= 7.0.1-2+deb.sury.org~wily+1) but it is not going to be installed
                         Depends: php7.0-json but it is not going to be installed
                         Depends: php7.0-opcache but it is not going to be installed
                         Conflicts: libapache2-mod-php5filter but 5.6.11+dfsg-1ubuntu3.1 is to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

Then finally I try to go back one more stage and install php7.0-cli but this also doesn’t work due to unmet dependencies:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 php7.0-cli : Depends: php7.0-common (= 7.0.1-2+deb.sury.org~wily+1) but it is not going to be installed
              Depends: php7.0-json but it is not going to be installed
              Depends: php7.0-opcache but it is not going to be installed
              Recommends: php-readline but it is not going to be installed
              Breaks: php5-cli but 5.6.11+dfsg-1ubuntu3.1 is to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

If I instead try to purge PHP5 first then it removes Roundcube and PHPMyAdmin and they refuse to install again afterwards due to missing modules.

Is there anything else I can try?

Thanks Robin

robinwilson • December 22, 2015

Ok I’ve figured out how to get PHP 7.0 installed which involved doing these steps instead (on my server):

sudo apt-get -y purge php5 libapache2-mod-php5 php5 php5-cli php5-common php5-curl php5-gd php5-imap php5-intl php5-json php5-mcrypt php5-mysql php5-pspell php5-readline php5-sqlite

Then remove a few extra things that were left behind:

sudo apt-get autoremove

Then install PHP 7.0:

sudo apt-get install php7.0

Then as PHPMyAdmin was removed Apache2 wouldn’t start so I had to remove the config file (I could have moved it instead):

sudo rm /etc/apache2/conf-enabled/phpmyadmin.conf

Then I had to restart Apache2:

sudo service apache2 restart

PHP 7.0 was then running

However I can’t now figure out how to get PHPMyAdmin installed again as it just says there are unmet dependencies with PHP 5 even though 7.0 is loaded and running (confirmed with PHPINFO();

Brennen Bearnes

DigitalOcean Employee

• December 22, 2015

Thanks for the detailed breakdown. I’ll see what I can figure out with regards to PHPMyAdmin.

bgarrison25 • December 31, 2015

I am also having an issue with phpMyAdmin…seems the package still relies on php5 packages so you can’t install through apt-get

Brennen Bearnes

DigitalOcean Employee

• December 31, 2015

For upgrading by way of APT, this PPA looks promising; a quick run-through on an Apache installation appears to work:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nijel/phpmyadmin
sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin

It’s somewhat iffier for Nginx, and it’s possible that installing PHPMyAdmin directly from upstream sources is a better idea. I’m still en route home from a holiday visit to family, but I’ll do a bit of digging and a more complete writeup this coming weekend.

robinwilson • January 9, 2016

Thanks bpb (replying to the post above as there is no option to reply to your post for some reason!)

I have now tested this repository and can confirm it does indeed update to a much newer version of PHPMyAdmin.

I did encounter an issue where it ran an SQL update script which failed but I worked around it by running the .sql update afterwards.

Here are my steps in case it is of use to others:

First I installed the package and tried to upgrade the package:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nijel/phpmyadmin
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

However this said the package had been held back and didn’t update to it but running this forced it to update:

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Unfortunately during the upgrade it failed with an error as the PHPMyAdmin SQL upgrade script (upgrade_column_info_4_3_0+.sql) tries to add the following two columns to pma__column_info but they already exist:

input_transformation
input_transformation_options

This generates the following error:

mysql said: ERROR 1060 (42S21) at line 28: Duplicate column name 'input_transformation'

I chose to ignore the warning and then went to /usr/share/phpmyadmin/sql after install and ran the upgrade_column_info_4_3_0+.sql script manually removing this offending part:

ALTER TABLE `pma__column_info`
  ADD `input_transformation` varchar(255) CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_bin NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
  ADD `input_transformation_options` varchar(255) CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_bin NOT NULL DEFAULT '';

Finally I had to edit the config file at /etc/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php and add the following two lines:

$cfg['Servers'][$i]['designer_settings'] = 'pma__designer_settings';
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['export_templates'] = 'pma__export_templates';

The errors about the extended features then went away.

The next step is to try PHP7 again!

Kingsley Felix • December 24, 2015

Nice… i will try it when there is time

Promise Akpan • December 31, 2015

Kingsley, better chill.

Let Ubuntu release a major update and we will see if it will have provisions for php7

Kingsley Felix • January 5, 2016

lol,

i hope it will be included in ubuntu 16.04

malcsilberman • January 3, 2016

I am getting on Apache installation

service apache2 restart

Restarting web server apache2 [fail]
The apache2 configtest failed. Output of config test was: apache2: Syntax error on line 140 of /etc/apache2/apache2.conf: Syntax error on line 1 of /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/php5.load: Cannot load /usr/lib/apache2/modules/libphp5.so into server: /usr/lib/apache2/modules/libphp5.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory Action ‘configtest’ failed. The Apache error log may have more information.

Brennen Bearnes

DigitalOcean Employee

• January 4, 2016

It looks like the upgrade process left /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/php5.load in place, which refers to a no-longer-installed shared library. Give this a shot:

sudo a2dismod php5
sudo apache2ctl configtest

On my test system, I get:

Output

Module php5 disabled.
To activate the new configuration, you need to run:
  service apache2 restart
AH00558: apache2: Could not reliably determine the server's fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.1.1. Set the 'ServerName' directive globally to suppress this message
Syntax OK

Your output might be missing the ServerName warning. As long as you see Syntax OK, you can restart Apache:

sudo service apache2 restart

Jonathan Caprell • January 11, 2016

This comment has been deleted

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Tutorial

How To Upgrade to PHP 7 on Ubuntu 14.04

Introduction

Prerequisites

Adding a PPA for PHP 7.0 Packages

Upgrading `mod_php` with Apache

Upgrading PHP-FPM with Nginx

Updating Nginx Site(s) to Use New Socket Path

Testing PHP

Conclusion

About the author(s)

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