How to Install PHP 7 in CentOS 7

by Aaron Kili | Published: October 13, 2017 | Last Updated: October 10, 2017

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The CentOS 7 official software repositories have PHP 5.4 which has reached the end of life and no longer actively maintained by the developers.

To keep up with the latest features and security updates, you need a newer (probably the latest) version of PHP on your CentOS 7 system.

For the purpose of this guide, we will be operating the system as root, if that is not the case for you, make use of the sudo command to acquire root privileges.

Installing PHP 7 on CentOS 7

1. To install PHP 7, you have to install and enable EPEL and Remi repository to your CentOS 7 system with the commands below.

# yum install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm
# yum install http://rpms.remirepo.net/enterprise/remi-release-7.rpm

2. Next, you need to install yum-utils, a collection of useful programs for managing yum repositories and packages. It has tools that basically extend yum’s default features.

It can be used for managing (enabling or disabling) yum repositories as well as packages without any manual configuration and so much more.

# yum install yum-utils

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

# yum-config-manager --enable remi-php70   [Install PHP 7.0]

If you want to install PHP 7.1 or PHP 7.2 on CentOS 7, just enable it as shown.

# yum-config-manager --enable remi-php71   [Install PHP 7.1]
# yum-config-manager --enable remi-php72   [Install PHP 7.2]

4. Now install PHP 7 with all necessary modules with the command below.

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

Afterwards, double check the installed version of PHP on your system.

# php -v

Check PHP Version in CentOS 7

Lastly, below is a list of useful PHP articles that you can read for additional information:

1. How to Use and Execute PHP Codes in Linux Command Line
2. How to Find MySQL, PHP and Apache Configuration Files
3. How to Test PHP MySQL Database Connection Using Script
4. How to Run PHP Script as Normal User with Cron

In this article, we have explained how to install PHP 7 on CentOS 7 Linux. You can send us any questions or additional thoughts via the feedback form below.