Installing PHP 7.0 on RHEL 7 and CentOS 7¶

PHP 5.4 has been end-of-life since September 2015 and is no longer supported by the PHP team. RHEL 7 still ships with PHP 5.4, and Red Hat supports it. Nextcloud 11+ requires PHP 5.6 or better, so upgrading to 5.6 is required. For more information see Installing PHP 5.6 on RHEL 6/7 and CentOS 6/7. However, it is highly recommended to upgrade to PHP 7.0+ for best security and performance.

Before upgrading, evaluate all of your PHP apps for compatibility with PHP 7.0.

RHEL 7 Upgrade to PHP 7.0¶

To upgrade to PHP 7.0, you must use the Software Collections (SCL) repository to be in compliance with your RHEL support contract, and not any other third-party repository. Follow these steps to install PHP 7.0 from SCL. First you must use your Subscription Manager to enable SCL:

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

Then install PHP 7.0 and these modules:

yum install rh-php70 rh-php70-php rh-php70-php-gd rh-php70-php-mbstring

You must also install the updated database module for your database. This installs the new PHP 7.0 module for MySQL/MariaDB:

yum install rh-php70-php-mysqlnd

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

yum install rh-php70-php-ldap

Disable loading the old PHP Apache modules by changing their names:

mv /etc/httpd/conf.d/php.conf /etc/httpd/conf.d/php54.off
mv /etc/httpd/conf.modules.d/10-php.conf /etc/httpd/conf.modules.d/10-php54.off

Symlink the PHP 7.0 Apache modules into place:

ln -s /opt/rh/httpd24/root/etc/httpd/conf.d/rh-php70-php.conf /etc/httpd/conf.d/
ln -s /opt/rh/httpd24/root/etc/httpd/conf.modules.d/15-rh-php70-php.conf /etc/httpd/conf.modules.d/
ln -s /opt/rh/httpd24/root/etc/httpd/modules/librh-php70-php7.so /etc/httpd/modules/

Then restart Apache:

service httpd restart

Verify with phpinfo that your Apache server is using PHP 7.0 and loading the correct modules; see PHP version and information to learn how to use phpinfo.

CentOS 7 Upgrade to PHP 7.0¶

To upgrade to PHP 7.0, use the Red Hat Software Collections (SCL) repository.