1 year ago by: matt

I work out of /usr/local/src for anything I'm compiling from source so adjust to suit your own setup.

cd /usr/local/src

Grab yourself the latest version available on the php.net website using wget in the current directory.

Once you have finished downloading you need to gunzip and untar:

sudo gunzip php-7.0.1.tar.gz
sudo tar -xvf php-7.0.1.tar
cd php-7.0.1

To keep track of what configuration I compiled software in I use a small configure.sh script in which I keep all of the configure commands. That way later on I can just open up configure.sh to see/change configuration instead of having to look through build history.

The configuration I need for this setup is the following:

sudo ./configure \
        --enable-fpm  \
        --prefix=/usr/local/php-7 \
        --with-zlib \
        --enable-shmop \
        --enable-sysvsem \
        --enable-sysvshm \
        --enable-sysvmsg \
        --enable-mbstring \
        --with-openssl \
        --enable-huge-code-pages \
I have that saved into configure.sh which is kept inside the php-src directory. 

Make sure its executable:

sudo chmod +x configure.sh
./configure.sh

If you are seeing errors at this point it is most likely due to missing libraries. Most of these can be fixed by sudo apt-get install LIBRARY-dev but a quick google search will confirm you are installing the right lib.

Once configure has finished with no errors you can go ahead and build/install:

sudo make
sudo make install

You now have PHP 7 installed into the /usr/local/php-7 path as defined with the --prefix tag during configure. The last thing you will need is to copy the default .ini file from the src into the correct location.

sudo cp php.ini-development /usr/local/php-7/lib/php.ini

In my case I am running php-fpm so I need to also copy the relevant files over:

sudo cp sapi/fpm/init.d.php-fpm /etc/init.d/php-fpm
sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/php-fpm

The default php-fpm.conf files are kept in the etc/ directory within the install location:

cd /usr/local/php-7/etc
sudo cp php-fpm.conf.default php-fpm.conf

cd php-fpm 
sudo cp www.conf.default www.conf 

I run the process as www-data, to change the user of the process open up www.conf and find the user/group lines and change as needed. In my case:

user = www-data
group = www-data

You should now be able to start/stop the process by running:
sudo /etc/init.d/php-fpm start
sudo /etc/init.d/php-fpm stop

I also like to have easy access to the php executable so I create a link to it in my bin directory:
sudo ln -s /usr/local/php-7/bin/php /usr/local/bin/php

If you now run php -v in the terminal it should output the correct version information for you.