Install PHP 7.4 on Ubuntu 20.04

In this guide, we are going to learn how to install PHP 7.4 on Ubuntu 20.04. PHP is a recursive acronym for Hypertext Preprocessor and is a widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML.

PHP 7.4 comes with a lot of improvements and new features over the previous versions such as;

• Typed Properties
• Arrow Functions
• Limited Return Type Covariance and Argument Type Contravariance
• Unpacking Inside Arrays
• Numeric Literal Separator
• Weak References
• Allow Exceptions from __toString()
• Opcache Preloading
• Several Deprecations
• Extensions Removed from the Core

See a complete list of changes in the ChangeLog.

Install PHP 7.4 on Ubuntu 20.04

Update and upgrade your system packages;

apt update
apt upgrade

Ubuntu 20.04 ships with PHP 7.4 in its default repos.

apt show php7.4

Package: php7.4
Version: 7.4.3-4ubuntu1
Priority: optional
Section: php
Origin: Ubuntu
Maintainer: Ubuntu Developers [email protected]
Original-Maintainer: Debian PHP Maintainers
Bugs: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+filebug
Installed-Size: 72.7 kB
Provides: php
Depends: libapache2-mod-php7.4 | php7.4-fpm | php7.4-cgi, php7.4-common
Homepage: http://www.php.net/
Download-Size: 9,244 B
APT-Sources: http://ke.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu focal/main amd64 Packages

Therefore the installation of PHP 7.4 is as simple as running the command below;

apt install php

You can as well use the command;

apt install php7.4

Either of the commands above installs PHP 7.4 on Ubuntu 20.04 along with its dependent packages.

Verifying the version of install PHP on Ubuntu 20.04;

php -v

PHP 7.4.3 (cli) (built: Mar 26 2020 20:24:23) ( NTS )
Copyright (c) The PHP Group
Zend Engine v3.4.0, Copyright (c) Zend Technologies
    with Zend OPcache v7.4.3, Copyright (c), by Zend Technologies

Install PHP 7.4 Modules/Extensions on Ubuntu 20.04

Depending on the requirements of your web application, you may need to install extra PHP 7.4 extensions/modules.

To install the modules/extensions simply use the command;

apt install php7.4-extension

Where extension is the name of the module/extension you are trying to install.

For example, you want to install the following PHP modules;

• Bcmath module for PHP
• bzip2 module for PHP
• IMAP module for PHP
• Internationalisation module for PHP
• MBSTRING module for PHP
• SOAP module for PHP
• Sybase module for PHP
• XSL module for PHP
• Zip module for PHP

You would simply execute the command below to install them;

apt install php7.4-{bcmath,bz2,imap,intl,mbstring,soap,sybase,xsl,zip}

Verifying PHP Version and Modules from Browser

You can also be able to verify version of install PHP and its modules via the browser. For this, you need a web server. Apache2 is installed by default as a dependency package for PHP.

Hence, start Apache and open port 80/TCP on firewall to allow external access.

systemctl enable --now apache2

ufw allow Apache

Next, create a PHP test page on your default web root directory as shown below;

echo "<?php phpinfo(); ?>" > /var/www/html/index.php

Then navigate to the address, http://your-server/index.php on you browser.

And that is how simple it is to install PHP 7.4 on Ubuntu 20.04.

Related Tutorials

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Install PHP 7.4 on CentOS 8

Install PHP 7.4 on Debian 10/Debian 9