Sometimes a SysAdmin receives strange requests. For example: a couple of days ago my client need to upload a new site, this new site needs PHP7.4 while their server run with PHP7.2. I’ve installed then 7.4 but all the other VirtualHosts (at least the important ones) broke under php7.4. Initially I was thinking on some kind of containers but I’ve found something simpler. This is how to run different PHP versions on the same server.
My setup
I always create or reuse a virtual machine for all my articles here. Because you should always test before break something important.
For this tutorial I’ve created a fresh install of an ¿old? Ubuntu server 18.04. I will have a site, sitio1 (sitio is site in spanish) that needs PHP 7.2; and another site that needs PHP 7.4, sitio2.
1. Add Ondrej php repository
Back in my days you had to edit config files by hand. But now we have this package software-properties-common to easily manage your distribution and independent software vendor software sources.
So our 1st step is to install that package:
sudo apt-get install software-properties-common
Our 2nd step is to actually add the repository by running:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php
Pay attention to on screen messages and follow the instructions. Then run
sudo apt-get update
2. Install two different PHP versions
2.1. PHP 7.2
The goal of this tutorial is to show you how I managed to run different php versions on the same server. I’m not installing (almost) any php module but if you are reading this you surely need some of them, mysql support for example. Don’t forget to install them.
sudo apt-get install php7.2 php7.2-fpm libapache2-mod-php7.2 libapache2-mod-fcgid
2.2 PHP 7.4
Now repeat the process with php 7.4. Remember to install the needed php modules.
sudo apt-get install php7.4 php7.4-fpm libapache2-mod-php7.4
3. Start fpm services
Now we need to start the fpm service for both versions
sudo systemctl start php7.2-fpm sudo systemctl start php7.4-fpm
You can then check the status of those service running:
sudo systemctl status php7.x-fpm
4. Creating the VirtualHosts
4.1 VirtualHost data
We are going to create first directories under the /var/www for every VirtualHost.
mkdir /var/www/sitio1 mkdir /var/www/sitio2 chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www
Secondly, create a php file on every directory with the following content only to show php information:
<?php
phpinfo();
?>
4.2 VirtualHost configuration
We need to create a .conf file for every site, with the following content:
nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/sitio1.conf
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin admin@sitio1
ServerName sitio1
DocumentRoot /var/www/sitio1
DirectoryIndex info.php
<Directory /var/www/sitio1>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
allow from all
</Directory>
<FilesMatch \.php$>
# this part do the trick
SetHandler "proxy:unix:/run/php/php7.2-fpm.sock|fcgi://localhost"
</FilesMatch>
ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/sitio1_error.log
CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/sitio1_access.log combined
</VirtualHost>
The create another file /etc/apache2/sites-available/sitio2.conf changing the proper information (sitio1 becomes sitio2, php7.2 becomes php7.4 etc)
5. Add DNS information
Or not. I mean, on the real life you will need to create proper DNS records for both sites. As this is only for testing and learning purposes, I’m only creating records on my /etc/hosts file. The IP address of this virtual machine is 192.168.122.14
Know I’m able to resolve sitio1 and sitio2.
6. Enabling everything
We need to enable some apache modules needed to handle this configuration. Then to enable those virtualhosts, and finally to start apache:
sudo a2enmod actions fcgid alias proxy_fcgi sudo a2ensite sitio1 sudo a2ensite sitio2 sudo systemctl start apache2
You can also test the configuration for misspellings, missing modules or any other problem with apachetcl configtest.
7. test time
Now we need to point a browser to http://sitio1 and http://sitio2 and check if their are running the correct PHP version:
¡Yay!. And this is how to run different PHP versions on the same server. Now I’m curious on what other combinations I could try.
Bonus: Older ubuntus
My client actually have Ubuntu 16 that went out of support back in April 2021. The repository I had to add was ppa:tomvlk/php-archive
