How To Install PHP on Debian 10 Buster

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install PHP on Debian 10 Buster. 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 on a Debian 10 (Buster) server.

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 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-get commands in the terminal:

sudo apt update 
sudo apt upgrade

Step 2. Installing PHP 7.3 on Debian 10.

Following commands to install the required packages on your system first. Then import packages signing key. After that configure PPA for the PHP packages on your system:

sudo apt install ca-certificates apt-transport-https 
wget -q https://packages.sury.org/php/apt.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -
sudo echo "deb https://packages.sury.org/php/ buster main" | tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/php.list

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-cli php7.3-common php7.3-curl php7.3-gd php7.3-json php7.3-mbstring php7.3-mysql php7.3-xml

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

### php -v

PHP 7.3.1-1 (cli) (built: Feb 14 2019 10:16:46) ( NTS )
Copyright (c) 1997-2018 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v3.3.1, Copyright (c) 1998-2018 Zend Technologies
    with Zend OPcache v7.3.1-1, Copyright (c) 1999-2018, by Zend Technologies

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
sudo systemctl status php7.3-fpm

Congratulations! You have successfully installed PHP. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the latest version of the PHP on the Debian 10 server. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official PHP website.