Installing PHP 5.6 on RHEL 6/7 and CentOS 6/7¶

Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS 6 still ship with PHP 5.3. Nextcloud requires PHP 5.6 or better. There are several third-party repositories that supply PHP 5.6, but you must use the Software Collections (SCL) repository to be in compliance with your RHEL support contract, and not any other third-party repository.

RHEL 6¶

Follow these steps to install PHP 5.6 from SCL. First you must use your Subscription Manager to enable SCL in RHEL 6:

subscription-manager repos --enable rhel-server-rhscl-6-eus-rpms

For RHEL 7:

subscription-manager repos --enable rhel-server-rhscl-7-eus-rpms

Then install PHP 5.6 and these modules:

yum install rh-php56 rh-php56-php rh-php56-php-gd rh-php56-php-mbstring

You must also install the updated database module for your database. This installs the new PHP 5.6 module for MySQL/MariaDB:

yum install rh-php56-php-mysqlnd

If you are using the Nextcloud LDAP app, you need this module:

yum install rh-php56-php-ldap

Disable loading the old PHP 5.3 Apache module:

mv /etc/httpd/conf.d/php.conf /etc/httpd/conf.d/php53.off

Copy the PHP 5.6 Apache modules into place:

cp /opt/rh/httpd24/root/etc/httpd/conf.d/rh-php56-php.conf /etc/httpd/conf.d/
cp /opt/rh/httpd24/root/etc/httpd/conf.modules.d/10-rh-php56-php.conf /etc/httpd/conf.modules.d/
cp /opt/rh/httpd24/root/etc/httpd/modules/librh-php56-php5.so /etc/httpd/modules/

Then restart Apache:

service httpd restart

Verify with PHP version and information that your Apache server is using PHP 5.6 and loading the correct modules.

CentOS 6/7¶

First install the SCL repo:

yum install centos-release-scl