Install PHP 7.4 on CentOS 8 / RHEL 8

Install PHP 7.4 on CentOS 8 RHEL 8. This guide let you learn how install the latest PHP version 7.4 on your CentOS system or your CentOS server on any VPS or any Cloud or any Dedicated hosting and configure it with Apache and Nginx.

The latest PHP 7.4 version is released on November 28th, 2019. It comes with a number of new features and a few incompatibilities that you should be aware of before upgrading from the previous version.

This installation is tested on Google Cloud Platform with a Compute Compute Engine VM Instance. This set up will work on all Linux servers.

Prerequisites

1. A CentOS server set up with sudo privileges.
2. Completed the initial CentOS server setup. You can choose CentOS 8 for boot image

If you are using Google Cloud Platform to install PHP you need the following steps to be done.

1. A running Compute Engine, see the Setting up Compute Engine Instance with CentOS.

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Getting Started

Make sure your CentOS server is having the latest packages by running the following command.

sudo yum update
sudo yum upgrade

This will update the package index and update the installed packages to the latest version.

Add EPEL and REMI repositories

Add the EPEL and REMI repositories which has PHP 7.4 package and other required PHP extensions.

sudo yum -y install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-8.noarch.rpm
sudo yum -y install https://rpms.remirepo.net/enterprise/remi-release-8.rpm

Once you have added these repositories you can install PHP 7.4.

Install PHP 7.4

Execute the following command to install dnf. Then you can install PHP.

sudo dnf -y install dnf-utils

Enable php:remi-7.4 module to install PHP 7.4.

sudo dnf module install php:remi-7.4

After the installation has completed, you can confirm the installation using the following command

php -v

Install PHP 7.4 Extensions

Installing PHP extensions are simple with the following syntax.

sudo yum install php-extension_name

Now you can install some commonly used php-extensions for WordPress with the following command.

sudo yum install -y php-dom php-simplexml php-ssh2 php-xml php-xmlreader php-curl php-date php-exif php-filter php-ftp php-gd php-hash php-iconv php-json php-libxml php-pecl-imagick php-mbstring php-mysqlnd php-openssl php-pcre php-posix php-sockets php-spl php-tokenizer php-zlib

Configure PHP 7.4

Now we configure PHP for Web Applications by changing some values in php.ini file.

For PHP 7.4 with Apache the php.ini location will be in following directory.

sudo nano /etc/php.ini

Hit F6 for search inside the editor and update the following values for better performance.

upload_max_filesize = 32M 
post_max_size = 48M 
memory_limit = 256M 
max_execution_time = 600 
max_input_vars = 3000 
max_input_time = 1000

Once you have modified your PHP settings you need to restart your Apache for the changes to take effect.

Configure PHP 7.4 FPM Pools

PHP 7.4 FPM allows you to configure the user and group that the service will run under. You can modify these with these commands

sudo nano /etc/php-fpm.d/www.conf

Change the following lines by replacing the www-data with your username.

user = username 
group = username 
listen.owner = username
listen.group = username

Hit CTRL+X and Y to save the configuration and check if the configuration is correct and restart PHP.

Restart PHP 7.4 FPM

Once you have updated your PHP FPM settings you need to restart it to apply the changes.

sudo php-fpm7.4 -t 
sudo service php7.4-fpm restart

Now you are having PHP 7.4 Installed and configured.

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Conclusion

Now you have learned how to install PHP 7.4 on your CentOS server.

Thanks for your time. If you face any problem or any feedback, please leave a comment below.