How To Install Latest PHP 8 on Debian 10

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This short tutorial will explain how to install the latest PHP 8 on Debian 10,

PHP 8 comes with a lot of new features and improvements, and some of the deprecated extensions which you should take a look at before moving to PHP 8. For example, xmlrpc moved to PECL, sury repository doesn’t provide these extensions.

php supported

Install Dependency

Install dependencies

sudo apt install apt-transport-https lsb-release ca-certificates wget curl -y

Install Sury Repository

We’ll use 3rd party repository to install PHP 8, even the maintener is the one who maintenance official PHP repository on Debian since PHP 5. Install Sury PHP repository for Debian 10

sh -c 'echo "deb https://packages.sury.org/php/ $(lsb_release -sc) main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/php.list'

Install PHP GPG key of Sury

curl -sSL -o /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/php.gpg https://packages.sury.org/php/apt.gpg

Update Repository Metadata

sudo apt update

Install PHP 8

Time to install the PHP 8 on our Debian 10, you can use multiple version of Debian on 1 server, we’ll talk about that later

sudo apt install php8.0 php8.0-fpm php8.0-curl  php8.0-mysqlnd php8.0-zip  php8.0-mbstring php8.0-bcmath -y

Check PHP 8 FPM

sudo systemctl status php8.0-fpm

php 8 fpm status

check current installed PHP 8 version

$ php8.0 -v
 
PHP 8.0.0 (cli) (built: Nov 30 2020 20:40:07) ( NTS )
Copyright (c) The PHP Group
Zend Engine v4.0.0-dev, Copyright (c) Zend Technologies
    with Zend OPcache v8.0.0, Copyright (c), by Zend Technologies

How to use PHP 8.0 with Nginx

to switch between PHP version, on nginx you only need to change the PHP Handler, let say the current server block has PHP 7.3

    location ~ \.php(?:$|/) {
        try_files $uri =404;
        fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
        include fastcgi_params;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $fastcgi_path_info;
        fastcgi_param HTTPS on;
        fastcgi_param modHeadersAvailable true; #Avoid sending the security headers twice
        fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php7.3-fpm.sock;
    }

change the fastcgi_pass to PHP 8

    location ~ \.php(?:$|/) {
        try_files $uri =404;
        fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
        include fastcgi_params;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $fastcgi_path_info;
        fastcgi_param HTTPS on;
        fastcgi_param modHeadersAvailable true; #Avoid sending the security headers twice
        fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php8.0-fpm.sock;
    }

validate the configuration and restart nginx

sudo nginx -t && sudo systemctl restart nginx

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