How to Install PHP 8 on CentOS 8 / RHEL 8

Hello Geeks, recently PHP 8 has been released officially. It is a new major version and comes with lot of new improvements and features. In this article, we will demonstrate on how to install latest version of PHP 8 on CentOS 8 and RHEL 8 system.

Prerequisites for PHP 8

• Minimal CentOS 8 / RHEL 8
• User with sudo rights
• Internet Connection

Let’s deep dive into the php 8 installation steps,

Note – These steps are also applicable for CentOS 8 stream operating system.

Step 1) Apply Updates

Login to your CentOS 8 / RHEL 8 system and apply the updates using beneath commands,

$ sudo dnf update
$ sudo dnf upgrade

Once all the updates are applied successfully then take a reboot of your system once.

$ sudo reboot

Step 2) Enable EPEL & Remi Repository

PHP 8 is not available in the default CentOS 8 and RHEL 8 package repositories. So, we have to enable EPEL and remi repositories. Run following commands to enable them,

$ sudo dnf install -y epel-release
$ sudo dnf install -y  http://rpms.remirepo.net/enterprise/remi-release-8.rpm
$ sudo dnf install -y dnf-utils

Run below command to list the available versions of PHP,

$ sudo dnf module list php

Output of above command would be:

Step 4) Install PHP 8 using Remi Module

Run the following commands to reset PHP module and install PHP 8 from remi-8.0 module.

$ sudo dnf module reset php
$ sudo dnf module install -y php:remi-8.0

Once the PHP packages are installed successfully then execute below command to verify PHP version,

[[email protected] ~]$ php -v
PHP 8.0.0 (cli) (built: Nov 24 2020 17:04:03) (NTS gcc x86_64 )
Copyright (c) The PHP Group
Zend Engine v4.0.0-dev, Copyright (c) Zend Technologies
[[email protected] ~]$

Great, above output confirms that PHP 8 has been installed. This PHP is for HTTPD web server.

To Install PHP 8 for NGINX web server, we have to install php 8 fpm package.

$ sudo dnf install -y php-fpm

Once php-fpm package is installed then start and enable its services by executing following command,

$ sudo systemctl enable php-fpm --now

To verify the status of php-fpm service, run

$ systemctl status php-fpm

PHP 8 extensions can also be installed via dnf command, some of the php 8 extensions installation example is listed below:

$ sudo dnf install -y php-{mysqlnd,xml,xmlrpc,curl,gd,imagick,mbstring,opcache,soap,zip}

Step 5) Configure PHP 8 for HTTPD & NGINX

To configure the PHP 8 for web servers, edit its configuration file and tweak the parameters that suits to your setup.

$ sudo vi /etc/php.ini
………
upload_max_filesize = 32M 
post_max_size = 48M 
memory_limit = 256M 
max_execution_time = 600 
max_input_vars = 3000 
max_input_time = 1000
………

Save & close the file and then restart web server’s service to make above changes into the effect.

For NGINX Web server, php-fpm is configured via its configuration file ‘/etc/php-fpm.d/www.conf’. you can tweak user and group information that suits to your setup. After making the changes, restart the php-fpm service.

That’s all from this article. I hope these helps you to install latest version of PHP 8 on your CentOS 8 / RHEL 8 system.

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