Php 5.6.x on CentOS 7

Post date: Dec 6, 2015 9:20:37 PM

Repo Installation

Open up a SSH connection to your server and run the following commands (make sure you run as sudo if you need to):

For CentOS 7 (including EPEL install)

If you already have EPEL installed:

For CentOS 6 (including EPEL install)

If you already have EPEL installed:

Enabling the Repo

Now we need to make sure the repo is enabled and select which version you want to install. We need to head over to/etc/yum.repos.d you should inside see a file called remi.repo.

Open the file in your favourite editor (Nano, Pico, Vi etc), you’ll see a number of sections. We need to make sure that the first section [remi] is enabled:

Note the line enabled=1 make sure this is set! Now technically you can actually go ahead and install PHP, but you will only get PHP 5.4.*. Which might be want to you want is so skip ahead to the next section!

If we want PHP 5.5 or PHP 5.6 we need to do a bit more work, further down in the repo.repo file you will see two additional sections [remi-php55] and [remi-php56], decide which PHP version you want to install and then enable the correct. So for PHP 5.6 we would change to:

Once you made your changes save your modified file and quit your editor.

Installing PHP

Now I’m assuming you don’t already have PHP installed, this bit is super simple.

So the above assumes you want MySQL, GD and Mcrypt support in your PHP, but you should see something like the below depending on which version of PHP you are trying to install:

As you can see PHP is installing version 5.5.20-2.el6.remi from the remi-php55 repo! Once you have hit Y to confirm the install restart apache and magical unicorns you have a better version of PHP!

You can also change your mind in the future by going back into the remi.repo file and enable a different PHP version and then run yum update and if you have moved from 5.5 to 5.6 it will upgrade PHP for you. If you want to downgrade for any reason you will need to remove PHP (sudo yum remove php*) and then reinstall the PHP modules you want.