How to Install PHP 7.4 in CentOS 7

The CentOS 7 official software repositories have PHP 5.4 which has reached the end of life and no longer actively maintained by the developers.

To keep up with the latest features and security updates, you need a newer (probably the latest) version of PHP on your CentOS 7 system.

For the purpose of this guide, we will be operating the system as root, if that is not the case for you, make use of the sudo command to acquire root privileges.

Installing PHP 7 on CentOS 7

1. To install PHP 7, you have to install and enable EPEL and Remi repository on your CentOS 7 system with the commands below.

   # yum install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm
   # yum install http://rpms.remirepo.net/enterprise/remi-release-7.rpm

2. Next, you need to install yum-utils, a collection of useful programs for managing yum repositories and packages. It has tools that basically extend yum’s default features.
   It can be used for managing (enabling or disabling) yum repositories as well as packages without any manual configuration and so much more.

   # yum install yum-utils

3. One of the programs provided by yum-utils is yum-config-manager, which you can use to enable Remi repository as the default repository for installing different PHP versions as shown.

   # yum-config-manager --enable remi-php70   [Install PHP 7.0]

   If you want to install PHP 7.1, PHP 7.2 PHP 7.3 or PHP 7.4 on CentOS 7, just enable it as shown.

   # yum-config-manager --enable remi-php71   [Install PHP 7.1]
   # yum-config-manager --enable remi-php72   [Install PHP 7.2]
   # yum-config-manager --enable remi-php73   [Install PHP 7.3]
   # yum-config-manager --enable remi-php74   [Install PHP 7.4]

4. Now install PHP 7 with all necessary modules with the command below.

   # yum install php php-cli php-common php-gd php-json php-ldap php-mbstring php-mysqlnd php-pdo php-xml

   Afterwards, double check the installed version of PHP on your system.

   # php -v
   PHP 7.4.2 (cli) (built: Jan 21 2020 11:35:20) ( NTS )
   Copyright (c) The PHP Group
   Zend Engine v3.4.0, Copyright (c) Zend Technologies