In this tutorial, we will show you how to install PHP 5.6 on CentOS 7 server. For those of you who didn’t know, PHP (recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is an open-source, popular general-purpose scripting language that is widely used and best suited for developing websites and web-based applications. It is a server-side scripting language that can be embedded in HTML.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step install PHP 5.6 on CentOS 7 server.
Prerequisites
- A server running one of the following operating systems: CentOS 7.
- It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
- SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
- A
non-root sudo useror access to theroot user. We recommend acting as anon-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.
Install PHP 5.6 on CentOS 7
Step 1. First, let’s start by ensuring your system is up-to-date.
yum clean all yum -y update
Step 2. Installing PHP 5.6 on CentOS 7.
First, you must add the Webtatic EL yum repository information corresponding to your CentOS version to yum:
rpm -Uvh https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm rpm -Uvh https://mirror.webtatic.com/yum/el7/webtatic-release.rpm
Now, install PHP 5.6using the apt command:
yum install php56w php56w-opcache
if you want to use PHP-fpm, then install:
yum install php56w-fpm php56w-opcache
Once the installation is complete, start the PHP-FPM service and enable it to automatically start at boot time:
sudo systemctl start php-fpm sudo systemctl enable php-fpm
Verify the PHP version using the following command:
php -V
It’s also worth noting that PHP 5 is no longer actively maintained and has reached end-of-life. Therefore, it’s not recommended to use PHP 5 in new projects. Instead, consider using a more recent version of PHP, such as PHP 7.4, which offers improved performance and security.
Congratulations! You have successfully installed PHP on CentOS 7. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing PHP 5.6 on CentOS 7 systems. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official PHP website.
