How To Upgrade to PHP 7.x on Ubuntu and Debian

Most Ubuntu servers come with PHP 5 installed. With recent updates of major PHP CMSs and platforms it requires users to update PHP to version 7.2 to benefit from latest changes and security patches.

PHP 7.2 comes with numerous improvements and new features such as:

Convert numeric keys in object/array casts
Counting of non-countable objects
Object typehint
HashContext as Object
Argon2 in password hash
Improve TLS constants to sane values
Mcrypt extension removed
New sodium extension

PHP 7.3 new changes:

Heredoc and Nowdoc syntax requirements are more relaxed
Allow trailing comma in function and method calls
PCRE to PCRE2 migration
References in list()
Deprecate image2wbmp() function
Deprecate FILTER_FLAG_SCHEME_REQUIRED and FILTER_FLAG_HOST_REQUIRED flags used with FILTER_VALIDATE_URL
Deprecate case-insensitive constants
Option to make json_encode and json_decode throw exceptions on errors
Introduced is_countable() function
Introduced array_key_first() and array_key_last() functions

Table of Contents

Install PHP 7.x on Ubuntu

If you want to upgrade your server’s PHP to the newest version and you’re running Ubuntu & Apache, the following commands will be good to use.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install php7.2-cli
sudo apt-get install php7.2-mysql php7.2-curl php7.2-json php7.2-cgi php7.2-xsl

Install PHP 7.x on Debian

sudo apt install lsb-release apt-transport-https ca-certificates
sudo wget -O /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/php.gpg https://packages.sury.org/php/apt.gpg
echo "deb https://packages.sury.org/php/ $(lsb_release -sc) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/php7.3.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt-get install php7.3 php-pear