How To Install PHP 8 on Rocky Linux 9

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install PHP 8 on Rocky Linux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, PHP a.k.a Hypertext Preprocessor is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language especially suited for web development. Many popular CMS such as WordPress, Magento, and Joomla is written in PHP. Frameworks such as Laravel, Symfony, and CodeIgniter. PHP 8 is a major update of the PHP language, there are numerous new features in it, such as enums, read-only properties, first-class callable syntax, fibers, intersection types, speed enhancements, and more.

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 Rocky Linux. 9.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Rocky Linux 9.
• 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 network connection or internet access.
• 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 Rocky Linux 9

Step 1. The first step is to update your system to the latest version of the package list. To do so, run the following commands:

sudo dnf makecache --refresh
sudo dnf install dnf-utils

Step 2. Add EPEL and REMI Repository.

Now we enable the Remi repository and enable the EPEL repository on Rocky Linux using the following command:

sudo dnf install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-9.noarch.rpm 
sudo dnf install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-next-release-latest-9.noarch.rpm
sudo dnf install http://rpms.remirepo.net/enterprise/remi-release-9.rpm

Next, enable PHP 8 Remi repository:

sudo dnf module list php
sudo dnf module enable php:remi-8.3

Step 3. Installing PHP 8 on Rocky Linux 9.

Once Remi PHP 8.3 module is enabled, you can now install PHP 8.3 and commonly used PHP extensions as follows:

sudo dnf install php php-cli php-fpm php-gd php-curl php-zip php-mbstring php-opcache php-intl php-mysqlnd

Now verify by checking the PHP version:

php -v

Output:

PHP 8.3.0 (cli) (built: Jan 16 2024 14:36:46) (NTS gcc x86_64)
Copyright (c) The PHP Group
Zend Engine v4.1.10, Copyright (c) Zend Technologies
    with Zend OPcache v8.1.10, Copyright (c), by Zend Technologies

To view modules loaded at any time, you can use the following command:

php -m

Congratulations! You have successfully installed PHP. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing PHP 8 on your Rocky Linux 9 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official PHP website.