How To Install PHP 8 on Linux Mint 20

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install PHP 8 on Linux Mint 20. For those of you who didn’t know, PHP is a popular general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited to web development. The PHP language is released under open-source standards, also object-oriented and interpreted scripting language that can be executed at the server-side. With this release, there are many new features, improvements, and deprecations from its predecessor (PHP 7).

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 a PHP 8.1 on a Linux Mint 20 (Ulyana).

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Linux Mint 20 (Ulyana).
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• 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 Linux Mint 20

Step 1. Before running the tutorial below, 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 install software-properties-common

Step 2. Installing PHP 8 on Linux Mint 20.

By default, PHP is not available on the Linux Mint 20 base repository. Now we import the Ondřej Surý PHP PPA repository to your system:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php

Next, refresh your APT repositories and install them:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install php8.1 libapache2-mod-php8.1

Confirm installation of PHP on Linux Mint 20:

php --version

Step 3. Installing the PHP Extensions.

If you’re a web developer like me, usually we need to install various extensions. To find the specific extension, you can always search for a specific PHP 8 extension by running the command below:

apt-cache search "php8.1-*"

You can install PHP extensions using the syntax:

sudo apt install php8.1-<extension-name>

Step 4. Testing PHP.

Now we create a test file that will return information about our server by running the command in the terminal:

echo "<?php phpinfo(); ?>" | sudo tee /var/www/html/info.php

Let’s make sure that the server correctly displays the content generated by the PHP script by opening this page in the browser: http://your-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 PHP. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the latest version of PHP 8.1 on the Linux Mint system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official PHP website.