How To Install PHP on Linux Mint 19

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install PHP on Linux Mint 19. For those of you who didn’t know, PHP is a popular general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited to web development. Most of the popular PHP frameworks and applications including WordPress, Laravel, Drupal, and Nextcloud are compatible with 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 PHP on a Linux Mint 19 (Tricia) server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Linux Mint 19 (Tricia).
• 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 Linux Mint 19

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 on Linux Mint 19.

We add an external PPA to install PHP 7.3. However, first, you have to install these required packages:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php

Next, install PHP 7.3 and some of the most commonly used extensions:

sudo apt install php7.3 php7.3-cli php7.3-common php7.3-fpm php7.3-opcache php7.3-curl php7.3-mbstring php7.3-mysql php7.3-zip php7.3-xml

Step 3. Verify Install PHP version.

Once it is completed, you can ensure that the latest stable release of PHP 7.3 is installed on your system by using the command:

php -v

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

<?php
phpinfo();
?>

Congratulations! You have successfully installed PHP. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing PHP 7.3 on your Linux Mint system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official PHP website.