How To Install PHP 7.3 on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install PHP 7.3 on Ubuntu 18.04 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.

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 7.3 on a Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic Beaver) server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic Beaver).
• 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 7.3 on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Bionic Beaver

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt-get commands in the terminal.

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Step 2. Installing PHP 7.3 on Ubuntu 18.04.

We’ll first have to add a third-party repository to be able to install PHP7.3:

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

Now we can install PHP7.3 and some common extensions for it. We’re also installing these extensions because you’ll find that many software like CMS (WordPress, Joomla, etc) require these extensions from time to time, so it’s good to have them readily installed:

sudo apt install php7.3 php7.3-fpm php7.3-mysql php-common php7.3-cli php7.3-common php7.3-json php7.3-opcache php7.3-readline php7.3-mbstring php7.3-xml php7.3-gd php7.3-curl

To verify the installation is completed, run the following command:

php -v

After you’ve installed PHP 7.3, you can start it, enable auto-start on boot, and check its status. You can do this with the following commands:

sudo systemctl start php7.3-fpm
sudo systemctl enable php7.3-fpm
systemctl status php7.3-fpm

Step 4. Installing PHP Extensions.

First, execute the command below to see all the available PHP modules:

apt-cache search php7.3

To install one PHP 7.3 extension run the command:

sudo apt install php-[package name]

To test PHP, create a test file named info.php with the content below. Save the file, then browse to it to see if PHP is working:

nano /var/www/html/info.php

In this file, paste the following code:

<?php
phpinfo();
?>

Try to access it at http://your_server_ip/info.php. If the PHP info page is rendered in your browser then everything looks good and you are ready to proceed further.

Congratulations! You have successfully installed PHP. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) 7.3 on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official PHP website.