Modern PHP

Appendix A. Installing PHP

Linux

Linux is my favorite development environment. I’ve owned a Macbook Pro and a Dell XPS 15, but my development happens in a Linux virtual machine. PHP is easy to install on Linux with a package manager like aptitude on Ubuntu or yum on CentOS.

This appendix demonstrates how to install PHP on the command-line. See Chapter 7 for instructions to setup PHP-FPM and the Nginx web server.

Package Managers

Most Linux distributions provide their own package manager. For example, Ubuntu uses the aptitude package manager. CentOS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) use the yum package manager. Package managers are the simplest way to find, install, update, and remove software on the Linux operating system.

Warning

Sometimes Linux package managers install out-of-date software. If you want the latest PHP version, you should use a custom repository for your package manager or build PHP from source.

Fortunately, we can supplement our Linux package manager’s default software sources with third-party repositories that contain more up-to-date, community-maintained software packages. We’ll use a custom software repository for both Ubuntu and CentOS to install the latest PHP version. Before we go any further, make sure you are the system root user or a user with sudo privileges. This is required to install software with a Linux package manager.

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

Ubuntu does not provide the latest PHP version in its default software repositories. We’ll add a community-maintained ...