My institution uses CentOS for all of our Linux servers, and I understand why. It’s super stable. But! The default software repository also tends to use really, really old packages. Which means I was running a WordPress server that I discovered was using PHP 5.5. No good in general since PHP 7 is much faster and secure, and untenable since the minimum version of PHP has been raised to PHP 5.6 in newer versions of WordPress.
Anyway, it’s easy to use an additional package manager and switch to a newer version of PHP. Here’s how I updated to PHP 7.2 (and by the way, made the WordPress site about twice as fast instantly).
First make sure you have repositories installed:
• EPEL repo
• Remi repos
• Yum-Utils
Steps:
Make sure things are up to date:
sudo yum update
- Enable PHP 7.2
sudo yum-config-manager --enable remi-php72
- Install PHP and modules
sudo yum install php php-mcrypt php-cli php-gd php-curl php-mysql php-ldap php-zip php-fileinfo
- Restart apache
sudo apachectl restart
- Check PHP version (you should get 7.2.x)
php –v