PHP 7.x On CentOS 7 : Which Solution ?

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Hi,

As you all know, CentOS 7 is shipping PHP 5.4, which is OK in some situations. Unfortunately, some applications like OwnCloud require a more recent version of PHP.

Up until recently, I’ve been using PHP 5.6 packages from the Webtatic repository. Despite the bad press this third party repo seems to have, it has been working perfectly for me for a few years. Here’s the PHP 5.6
packages I have on an OwnCloud server:

$ rpm -qa | grep php php56w-devel-5.6.40-1.w7.x86_64
php56w-pdo-5.6.40-1.w7.x86_64
php56w-gd-5.6.40-1.w7.x86_64
php56w-mysql-5.6.40-1.w7.x86_64
php56w-process-5.6.40-1.w7.x86_64
php56w-pear-1.10.4-1.w7.noarch php56w-common-5.6.40-1.w7.x86_64
php56w-xml-5.6.40-1.w7.x86_64
php56w-pecl-redis-3.1.6-1.w7.x86_64
php56w-cli-5.6.40-1.w7.x86_64
php56w-mcrypt-5.6.40-1.w7.x86_64
php56w-mbstring-5.6.40-1.w7.x86_64
php56w-pecl-igbinary-2.0.5-1.w7.x86_64
php56w-pecl-apcu-4.0.11-2.w7.x86_64
php56w-intl-5.6.40-1.w7.x86_64
php56w-5.6.40-1.w7.x86_64
php56w-soap-5.6.40-1.w7.x86_64

Now I’ll have to upgrade these to some version of PHP 7. So I googled
“php 7 CentOS 7” and found quite a wealth of – sometimes contradictory –
information.

1. The “recommended” way of doing things seems to be the Red Hat Software Collections. Correct me if I’m wrong. I wonder if this way of doing things will enable me to get all the PHP modules listed above.

2. The use of Webtatic seems to be frowned upon. I still have to figure out why, since this repository has always worked perfectly for me.

3. Then there’s another repository managed by Remi Collet. Any thoughts on that?

And then there’s also the question : which version of PHP 7 should I
choose ? On my servers, I’m mainly hosting WordPress, Dolibarr and OwnCloud.

Any suggestions ? I’m no lamer for doing a bit of RTFM, so a pointer to documentation will do. The problem is not so much that there is no information on the subject. It’s rather : there’s too much. As we say in France : I’m confused about which saint to send my prayers to. :o)

Cheers,

Niki
—
Microlinux – Solutions informatiques durables
7, place de l’église – 30730 Montpezat Site : https://www.microlinux.fr Blog : https://blog.microlinux.fr Mail : info@microlinux.fr Tél. : 04 66 63 10 32

5 thoughts on - PHP 7.x On CentOS 7 : Which Solution ?

  • I package PHP 7.3.x linked against LibreSSL rather than OpenSSL.

    I also package MariaDB 10.2.x and updated Apache.

    Right now there is a yum install issue – you have to manually remove the mariadb libs from 5.x to install. The dependencies are met, yum just can’t figure it out.

    https://lirelamp.com/

    Some of my documentation is a bit out of date, but no one is paying me, so…

    I do things differently than “software collections” – my philosophy is to just replace the system provided versions rather than put them in /opt.

    I have that philosophy because I prefer to set up a VPS for a purpose and if that purpose is a LAMP stack I don’t see the point of keeping the crusty MariaDB / PHP in place so I just replace them with modern versions which largely are modified when needed Fedora spec files.

    With the exception that I build against LibreSSL instead of against OpenSSL.

  • Hi,

    Friday, March 15, 2019, 8:51:15 AM, you wrote:

    NK> As you all know, CentOS 7 is shipping PHP 5.4, which is OK in some NK> situations. Unfortunately, some applications like OwnCloud require a NK> more recent version of PHP.

    I had the same problem a few weeks ago and decided to stick with the webtatic repository. As our typo3 instance required 7.0, I updated from php.5.6 to php.7.0 by simply “yum remove php56w …” and “yum install php70w …”. Everything went smooth and without problem. Before I updated, I checked if all used 5.6 packages were available in the 7.0 version.

    I took that path because I could easily identify that all required packages were available in both versions. This might be more complicated if I would have moved from webtatic-5.6 to remy-7.0.

    You may also consider to crossgrade from owncloud to nextcloud :-)

    best regards
    –

  • Le 15/03/2019 à 09:29, Michael Schumacher a écrit :

    After some more experimenting, I decided to opt for the same solution, and I went with PHP 7.1.

    I wrote a little blog article on the subject :

    https://www.microlinux.fr/php-71-CentOS/

    Works like a charm.

    Cheers,

    Niki

    —
    Microlinux – Solutions informatiques durables
    7, place de l’église – 30730 Montpezat Site : https://www.microlinux.fr Blog : https://blog.microlinux.fr Mail : info@microlinux.fr Tél. : 04 66 63 10 32

  • Le 18/03/2019 à 09:43, Fabian Arrotin a écrit :

    Thanks for the heads-up. For the record, I didn’t know about anything about this fine documentation.

    Anyway, I read through your article as well as Remi’s documentation, which convinced me this was the way to go.

    I ended up completely rewriting my article. Here’s the updated version:

    * https://www.microlinux.fr/php-71-CentOS/

    You have an honorable mention in the “Remerciements” section.

    Un gentil bonjour de la garrigue gardoise,

    Niki

    —
    Microlinux – Solutions informatiques durables
    7, place de l’église – 30730 Montpezat Site : https://www.microlinux.fr Blog : https://blog.microlinux.fr Mail : info@microlinux.fr Tél. : 04 66 63 10 32