How To Install PHP 5.6 on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install PHP 5.6 on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. 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. By default, Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial) now comes with PHP 7.0. You can install PHP 5.6 in parallel and switch between them using the following instructions.

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 installation of PHP 5.6 on a Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus) server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus).
• 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 user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-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 Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

Step 1. It’s always a good practice to keep your system up-to-date with the latest security patches and bug fixes. Open your terminal and run the following commands:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

These commands will update the package lists and upgrade any outdated packages on your system, ensuring a stable and secure environment for the PHP installation.

Step 2. Installing PHP 5.6 on Ubuntu 16.04.

Since Ubuntu 16.04 LTS doesn’t include PHP 5.6 in its default repositories, we need to add an external repository maintained by Ondřej Surý. This repository provides up-to-date PHP packages for various Ubuntu versions.

Run the following commands to add the repository:

sudo apt-get install -y software-properties-common
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php

 With the repository added, you can now proceed to install PHP 5.6. Run the following command:

sudo apt-get install -y php5.6

Verify the PHP version using the following command:

php -V

Result:

PHP 5.6.32-1+ubuntu16.04.1+deb.sury.org+1 (cli)
Copyright (c) 1997-2016 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.6.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2016 Zend Technologies
 with Zend OPcache v7.0.6-dev, Copyright (c) 1999-2016, by Zend Technologies

Step 3. Installing PHP 5.6 Extensions.

PHP extensions are additional modules that provide extra functionality and features to the core PHP language. Many popular web applications and frameworks require specific extensions to be installed. Here’s how you can install some commonly used PHP 5.6 extensions:

sudo apt-get install -y php5.6-mysql php5.6-xml php5.6-mbstring php5.6-curl

You can verify the installed extensions by running:

php -m

Congratulations! You have successfully installed PHP. Thanks for using this tutorial to install the latest stable version of PHP 5.6 on the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS  (Xenial Xerus) system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official PHP website.