Upgrade from PHP 7.0 to PHP 7.1

Posted on May 14, 2018

PHP

Add Ondrejs PPA Repo

PPA's or Personal Package Archive, is a collection of software not included in Ubuntu by default. Typically these repositories focus on a single program, but they can include more depending on the person maintaining them. Ondřej Surý has created this PPA which has the latest versions of PHP in it. Lets add it to your system, and update to get a list of all the software we can install.

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

$ sudo apt-get update

Install PHP 7.1

Lets stop our server first, then install PHP 7.1.

$ service apache2 stop

$ sudo apt-get install php7.1 php7.1-common

We'll also install some extra packages for our PHP installation - these are needed for Laravel and Composer!

$ sudo apt-get install php7.1-curl php7.1-xml php7.1-zip php7.1-gd php7.1-mysql php7.1-mbstring php7.1-mysql

Once that is done, lets check PHP is updated on the CLI

$ php -v

If the first row looks like this, we've done good so far! PHP 7.1.11-1+ubuntu16.04.1+deb.sury.org+1 (cli) (built: Oct 27 2017 13:49:56) ( NTS )

Remove PHP 7.0

Now we have PHP7.1, lets get rid of PHP7.0

$ sudo apt-get purge php7.0 php7.0-common

Once this has been done, I usually restart the server.

$ sudo shutdown -r now

Make PHP7.1 used by Apache

Finally, we need to tell Apache to use PHP7.1 now PHP 7.0 is not being used. Lets enable the PHP mod!

$ a2enmod php7.1

$ service apache2 restart

Thats it - PHP should now be using PHP 7.1 - enjoy your amazing new features such as function return types and multiple error catch's! If you are having issues, feel free to prod me on Twitter at @bhaktaraz