PHP7 Apache Ubuntu Setup

My workflow to get PHP7 running with apache on ubuntu via php-fpm.

From an empty folder via an empty Ubuntu Vagrantbox to an Apache server thats running PHP7.

Warning: You'll need Vagrant and quite some bandwidth for this :)

Automatic setup

Just clone this repository and run vagrant up in it (Go grab a coffe or something, this will take a while...):

$ git clone https://github.com/cookiecavekeeper/php7_apache_ubuntu_setup.git
$ cd php7_apache_ubuntu_setup
$ vagrant up

And after a few minutes you are done!

Manual Setup

Here we will do everything the scripts above do, but manually (with a bit of explanation).

VM setup

Initializing the box (from a base ubuntu/trusty64)

$ mkdir php7
$ cd php7
$ vagrant init ubuntu/trusty64

Now you should edit the Vagrantfile to add an IP address and some more RAM. Just comment out the following lines and edit them to something like this:

config.vm.network "private_network", ip: "192.168.7.8"
config.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |vb|
  vb.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--memory", "2048"]
end

Now run: (this takes a while)

$ vagrant up

And once that's done:

$ vagrant ssh

Inside our VM

Installing dependencies

First we need git:

$ sudo apt-get install git

Now we can get the php-src repo: (this takes a while as well)

$ git clone https://github.com/php/php-src.git --depth=1

Once inside, we'll install all the dependecies we need to actually compile any php source code:

$ cd php-src
$ sudo apt-get install build-essential autoconf automake libtool bison re2c

What we just installed: build-essentials: compilers, make etc.... autoconf: used to generate the configure script automake: generates Makefile.in files libtool: helps manage shared libraries bison: is used to generate the PHP parser re2c: is used to generate the PHP lexer (Stolen from the PHP internals Book)

Installing extension dependencies

Everybody needs a different set of extensions in their build, but I put together a list that I think is pretty solid. We first need the following development packages:

$ sudo apt-get install libxml2-dev libssl-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libjpeg-dev libpng12-dev libc-client-dev libmcrypt-dev libxslt1-dev
$ sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libc-client.a /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc-client.a

Actually building PHP

Now that we have all the dependencies, we can actually start building PHP itself. Inside the php-src directory we run:

$ ./buildconf

This will generate the necessary configuration files / headers etc (--force flag will clear configuration caches).

Now we are going to run ./configure. Here comes the Part where everyone will pass a set of different flags (for a list of all of the run: ./configure --help).

I used this site a lot to find out what I had to install for certain flags / error messages.

Here is my / our version (that needs the packages listed above in Installing extension dependencies):

./configure --enable-fpm \
--with-libdir=/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu \
--with-kerberos \
--with-fpm-user=vagrant \
--with-fpm-group=vagrant \
--without-pear \
--with-openssl \
--with-pdo-sqlite \
--with-pdo-mysql=mysqlnd \
--enable-sockets \
--with-gettext \
--with-curl \
--enable-exif \
--enable-ftp \
--with-gd \
--enable-mbstring \
--with-mcrypt \
--enable-zip \
--with-zlib \
--with-imap \
--with-imap-ssl \
--enable-xmlreader \
--enable-phar \
--with-xsl \
--enable-cgi \
--with-jpeg-dir=/usr \
--with-png-dir=/usr \

Once we have run this and got no errors we get to the exciting part:

$ make
$ sudo make install

Now we have php installed (into /usr/local) and can run php -v to verify that =D

Setting up PHP-FPM

To use PHP-FPM we just have to copy a few configuration files around:

$ sudo cp sapi/fpm/init.d.php-fpm /etc/init.d/php-fpm
$ sudo chmod 755 /etc/init.d/php-fpm
$ sudo cp /usr/local/etc/php-fpm.conf.default /usr/local/etc/php-fpm.conf
$ sudo cp /usr/local/etc/php-fpm.d/www.conf.default /usr/local/etc/php-fpm.d/www.conf

Not sure why but we have to change the last line of: /usr/local/etc/php-fpm.conf to:

include=etc/php-fpm.d/*.conf

To see if it works we can run:

$ sudo service php-fpm start

Since we want php-fpm to start on startup we run:

$ sudo update-rc.d php-fpm defaults

Setting up Apache with PHP-FPM

Now since I'm used to working with apache I'm using it as an example here, but you can use any php5 guide for setting up nginx with php-fpm as well.

To install everything, we first need to uncomment a few package sources from: /etc/apt/sources.list You should comment out the following lines:

deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu trusty multiverse
deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu trusty multiverse
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu trusty-updates multiverse
deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu trusty-updates multiverse

Alright, now we can run the following to install apache and all we need to run it with php fpm:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install apache2-mpm-worker libapache2-mod-fastcgi
$ sudo a2enmod actions fastcgi alias

(That last command enables the fastcgi and alias modules in apache).

Now we add the following somewhere into the /etc/apache2/apache2.conf file:

<IfModule mod_fastcgi.c>
        AddHandler php5-fcgi .php
        Action php5-fcgi /php5-fcgi
        Alias /php5-fcgi /usr/lib/cgi-bin/php5-fcgi
        FastCgiExternalServer /usr/lib/cgi-bin/php5-fcgi -host 127.0.0.1:9000 -pass-header Authorization
</IfModule>

But Apache thinks that /php5-fcgi is a directory it blocks it by default. So we have to delete the following block from the file:

<Directory />
        .........
</Directory>

Well now we just restart apache and are good to go:

$ sudo service apache2 restart

If you now put a test.php file into /var/www/html with the following content:

<?php

phpinfo();

You should now see the phpinfo page when you visit 192.168.7.8/test.php on your host pc.

If did something wrong or generally made and mistakes, please tell me, I'm still just learning all this stuff =D

paulsonnenschein/php7_apache_ubuntu_setup