How to Install and Configure PHP 7.0 or PHP 7.1 on Ubuntu 16.04

PHP and related packages are the most commonly used components when deploying a web server. In this article, we will learn how to setup PHP 7.0 or PHP 7.1 on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

Prerequisites

• An up-to-date Ubuntu 16.04 server instance.
• A sudo user. See instructions for Debian in this Vultr Document.

Install and configure PHP 7.0

Since Ubuntu 16.04, PHP 7.0 has replaced PHP 5.x and become the default version of PHP in the official Ubuntu application repository. You can install and configure PHP 7.0 on your Ubuntu 16.04 system as follows.

First of all, you can list all of the available PHP 7.0-related packages for review:

apt-cache pkgnames | grep php7.0

Then you can install the package your to-be-deployed application requires.

For example, if you want to deploy your application based on the LAMP stack, usually, you can install the below packages after installing Apache:

sudo apt-get install -y apache2
sudo apt-get install -y php7.0 libapache2-mod-php7.0 php7.0-cli php7.0-common php7.0-mbstring php7.0-gd php7.0-intl php7.0-xml php7.0-mysql php7.0-mcrypt php7.0-zip

Alternatively, if you want to deploy your application based on the LEMP stack, you can install the following packages after installing Nginx:

sudo apt-get install -y nginx
sudo apt-get install -y php7.0 php7.0-fpm php7.0-cli php7.0-common php7.0-mbstring php7.0-gd php7.0-intl php7.0-xml php7.0-mysql php7.0-mcrypt php7.0-zip

After the installation, you can confirm that with:

php -v

The output should resemble:

PHP 7.0.15-0ubuntu0.16.04.4 (cli) ( NTS )
Copyright (c) 1997-2017 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v3.0.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2017 Zend Technologies
    with Zend OPcache v7.0.15-0ubuntu0.16.04.4, Copyright (c) 1999-2017, by Zend Technologies

The main config file of PHP 7.0 will be saved as /etc/php/7.0/apache2/php.ini (Apache) or /etc/php/7.0/fpm/php.ini (Nginx). You can use the vi text editor to modify relevant settings in that file.

sudo vi /etc/php/7.0/apache2/php.ini

or:

sudo vi /etc/php/7.0/fpm/php.ini

Remember to restart Apache or Nginx if you make any changes to that file or any other PHP config files:

sudo systemctl restart apache2.service

or:

sudo systemctl restart nginx.service php7.0-fpm.service

Install and configure PHP 7.1

If you want to install PHP 7.1, the latest stable release of PHP at the time of writing this article, on Ubuntu 16.04, a convenient method is to use the PPA (Personal Package Archives) repository.

First of all, you need to add specified PPA to the system apt repository:

sudo apt-get install -y python-software-properties
sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:ondrej/php
sudo apt-get update -y

Then you can list all of the available PHP 7.1-related packages for review:

apt-cache pkgnames | grep php7.1

From now on, you can install and configure PHP 7.1 in the same fashion as mentioned in the chapter about PHP 7.0 above. Basically, replacing 7.0 with 7.1 in relevant commands will get your job done.

That’s it. Thanks for reading.