With the launch of Laravel Octane, I decided it was time to update to PHP 8 on my debian box. This was the process, compiled from a number of webpages which seemed to have cut and paste the wget line wrongly. The php extensions are those needed for Laravel.

update-alternatives is a lovely little tool to select which php version to use.

    apt-get install lsb-release apt-transport-https ca-certificates
    wget -O /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/php.gpg https://packages.sury.org/php/apt.gpg
    echo "deb https://packages.sury.org/php/ $(lsb_release -sc) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/php.list
    apt-get update
    apt-cache search php 8
    apt install -y php8.0-{mysql,cli,common,snmp,ldap,curl,mbstring,zip,tidy,xml,opcache}
    update-alternatives --config php
    php -v

However, this only worked at the command line, to get apache to work with php8.0 i also ran

    apt-get install php8.0-fpm libapache2-mod-php8.0
    a2dismod php7.4
    a2enmod php8.0
    systemctl restart apache2

and viola! the phpinfo() was now version 8.0.3!

However, a tested a Laravel 5 app and it errored with a blank screen. So had to update composer to version 2 and run a composer upgrade like so

    composer self-update --2
    composer upgrade 

What an improvement in speed for composer! I had to update these lines in the composer json to

        "php": "^7.4|^8.0",
        "fzaninotto/faker": "^1.9.1",
        "phpunit/phpunit": "^9.3"    

I still have a laravel 5.5 app that i like to use, to downgrade back to php7.4

a2dismod php8.0
a2enmod php7.4
systemctl restart apache2

and to re-enable php 8.0

a2enmod php8.0
a2dismod php7.4
systemctl restart apache2

But there is a better way, edit the apache2-site-74.conf and add this to the virtual host conf

        <FilesMatch \.php$>
                # Apache 2.4.10+ can proxy to unix socket
                SetHandler "proxy:unix:/var/run/php/php7.4-fpm.sock|fcgi://localhost/"
        </FilesMatch>

and enable the proxy module

a2enmod proxy_fcgi
systemctl restart apache2

and viola! both versions work, php8 is the default, with php7.4 enabled for the site.

Perfect!

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