How To Install PHP 8 on Debian 10

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install PHP 8 on Debian 10. For those of you who didn’t know, PHP (recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a popular server scripting language known for creating dynamic and interactive Web pages. PHP is a widely-used programming language on the Web.

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 8 on a Debian 10 (Buster).

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Debian 10 (Buster).
• 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 8 on Debian 10 Buster

Step 1. Before we install any software, it’s important to make sure your system is up to date by running the following apt commands in the terminal:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Step 2. Installing PHP 8 on Debian 10.

Now we add SURY PHP PPA repository:

sudo apt install apt-transport-https lsb-release ca-certificates wget
sudo wget -O /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/php.gpg https://packages.sury.org/php/apt.gpg 
sudo sh -c 'echo "deb https://packages.sury.org/php/ $(lsb_release -sc) main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/php.list'
sudo apt update

With the repository added you can begin the installation of PHP 8.0 on the Debian system using the following command:

sudo apt install php8.0-common php8.0-cli

To verify the installed version, use the php command:

$ php -v

PHP 8.0.0-dev (cli) (built: Nov 26 2020 13:17:13) ( NTS )
Copyright (c) The PHP Group
Zend Engine v4.0.0-dev, Copyright (c) Zend Technologies

Step 3. Install PHP 8 Extensions on the Debian system.

Run the following command to Install additional packages with PHP 8 on the Debian system:

sudo apt install php8.0-{bz2,curl,intl,mysql,readline,xml}

For Nginx, you need to install FPM, execute the following command to install PHP 8 FPM:

sudo apt install php8.0-fpm

Step 3. Test PHP.

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

Paste the following code:

<?php
phpinfo();
?>

Try to access it at http://server_ip_address/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 the PHP. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing PHP 8 on Debian 10 Buster system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official PHP website.