Upgrading to PHP 7.3 or 7.4

  • Good evening –

    Today I opened the can of worms of considering how to upgrade my version of PHP from 7.2 to something newer.

    The WordPress “site health” tool says I need to upgrade.

    I use Ubuntu 18.04 and the APT repositories don’t have PHP 7.3 or 7.4.

    Most of the advice I’ve seen through extensive google searches say I should use a “PPA” – the one that the nice fellow Ondrej maintains.

    Given the number of references to the Ondrej PPA’s he maintains, I’m guessing his work is pretty reputable. But I’m concerned about handing over a piece of my server’s integrity to an unofficial resource.

    The only other avenue I’ve found is downloading and installing the new PHP version in tar-ball form from zend.net.

    Then there is the question of upgrading my PHP extensions. I know how to find the ones I have installed and how to see what PHP version they are – but I’m not quite sure how to easily upgrade them with the new version of PHP.

    Thankfully, WordPress fails fairly gracefully when there are PHP issues – from what I’ve seen searching this forum the problems have been fairly minor.

    If anyone might be willing to share their insights and experiences on upgrading to a newer version of PHP not in the production APT repositories, I’d be grateful to learn from you.

    I’ve been writing some technical LAMP stack installation documentation geared to WordPress – I’ll include a section about this in hopes to help others in the future.

    Many Thanks!

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  • Hello

    you can safely choose PPA/Ondrej, just don’t forget to install all extensions you have on the old version and then disable it and enable the new one

    Regards

    Thread Starter jgstroup

    (@jgstroup)

    Thank you RoseHosting –

    From all the posts I was able to find, it does seem like the PPA/Ondrej is heavily relied upon.

    Decades ago, we used to say “No one ever got fired for buying IBM.” Even if their products were crap…

    I don’t know if PPA/Ondrej has reached that stature – but perhaps it has. I think for now I’ll stick with the Ubuntu repositories – but I may change my mind.

    I’m concerned about the package “PHP” (without the version suffix) Doing the “APT SHOW PHP” command – it ends with the line:

    “This package is a dependency package, which depends on Ubuntu’s default
    PHP version (currently 7.2).”

    So maybe the PPA/Ondrej repository has a newer versions of the PHP package, but especially since php 7.3 and 7.4 are in that repository, I don’t know how I’d keep the versions straight.

    Any comments or suggestions would be appreciated – Thanks!

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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