Installing PHP

EPEL ( Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux ) and REMI are just two between several useful yum repositories for RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) based systems.

EPEL
REMI
RPMFusin
ELRepo
Webtatic

We need they to keep our systems up to date with latest packages, because these repositories having most of the RPMs required for our servers.

These repositories are created, maintained, and managed by Linux’s professional programmers, just as an example, the following GitHub link belongs to the creator or REMI repository:

remi (GitHub)

Some packages are included in the repositories that are conﬁgured when the operating system is installed.

How to install EPEL

yum install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm

How to find EPEL files

find / -name "epel*repo"

How to install REMI

yum install http://rpms.remirepo.net/enterprise/remi-release-7.rpm

How to find REMI files

find / -name "remi*repo"

YUM

YUM ( Yellowdog Updater, Modified ) is a command-line package management utility for RPM-based Linux systems.

Yum is useful for RPMs which have dependencies, Yum searches for all dependencies of any RPM in all available repositories.

YUM Utils

Yum Utils is a collection of useful programs for managing yum repositories and packages. Its main purpose is to extend yum’s default features.

Sysadmins often use It for managing (enabling or disabling) yum repositories as well as packages without having to do any manual configuration.

How to install Yum-config-manager

yum install yum-utils

One of the programs provided by yum-utils is yum-config-manager, which you can use to enable Remi repository as the default repository for installing different PHP versions.

How to use Yum-config-manager

We already saw with the command “find” that our system has several PHP versions inside the REMI folder, we can then choose one of them and enable it using the yum-config-manager, as shown below:

yum-config-manager --enable remi-php73

Basically, whatever is inside REMI can be enabled using the above command, see below image, you already have multiple versions of PHP ready to be enabled.

Installing PHP along with its modules

yum install php php-mcrypt php-cli php-gd php-curl php-mysql php-ldap php-zip php-fileinfo

PHP version

php -v

[root@centos7 ~]# php -v
PHP 7.3.15 (cli) (built: Feb 18 2020 09:25:23) ( NTS )
Copyright (c) 1997-2018 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v3.3.15, Copyright (c) 1998-2018 Zend Technologies
[root@centos7 ~]#

This procedure can be followed either for installing PHP for the first time and also to upgrade PHP to a newer version.

Test PHP using the phpinfo() function

The phpinfo() function is a built-in function that can be used to show configuration details, installed modules, etc.

<?php
 phpinfo();
?>

You can create a simple file including this function and delete it immediately after you saw all the PHP information displayed via html page.

Testing PHP using the “phpinfo()” function

http://centos7.local.lab/test.php

In case the page is not loaded you can try reloading Apache.

systemctl restart httpd.service

Check Apache status after the reset

systemctl status httpd.service

Delete the test file

Do not forget to delete the test file because it might give a hacker information they need to attack the server.