Easy Guide to Install PHP 7.4 on AlmaLinux 9

This guide intends to teach you to Install PHP 7.4 on AlmaLinux 9. PHP 7.4 was released on November 28, 2019, and it’s the last version before PHP 8. It brings lots of new features, syntax additions, and fixes.

Here are the most interesting PHP 7.4 changes to be aware of:

Arrow functions for cleaner one-liner functions
Preloading to improve performance
Typed properties in classes
Improved type variance
The null coalescing assignment operator as a shorthand
FFI for better extension development in PHP
Underscores can be used to format numeric values
Spread operator in arrays etc.

what you read in this post?

Install PHP 7.4 on AlmaLinux 9
- Set up PHP 7.4 on AlmaLinux 9
- Conclusion

Install PHP 7.4 on AlmaLinux 9

To install PHP 7.4, you must log in to your server as a non-root user with sudo privileges. To do this, you can follow our guide the Initial Server Setup with AlmaLinux 9.

Now follow the steps below to Install PHP 7.4 on AlmaLinux 9.

Set up PHP 7.4 on AlmaLinux 9

First, you need to update your local package index with the following command:

sudo dnf update -y

Remove Old Versions of PHP

Then, you need to remove the PHP and PHP-FPM previous versions if you have them installed on your server. To do this, run the following command:

sudo dnf remove php php-fpm -y

Then remove the rest of the package extensions with the command below:

sudo dnf remove php* -y

Install Epel and Remi Repositories

At this point, you need to install Epel and Remi repos on your server by using the commands below:

# sudo dnf install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-9.noarch.rpm
# sudo dnf install https://rpms.remirepo.net/enterprise/remi-release-9.rpm

List PHP Versions

Now you can use the command below to list the available PHP versions:

sudo dnf module list php -y

Output
AlmaLinux 9 - AppStream
Name      Stream       Profiles                       Summary
php       8.1          common [d], devel, minimal     PHP scripting language

Remi's Modular repository for Enterprise Linux 9 - x86_64
Name      Stream       Profiles                       Summary
php       remi-7.4     common [d], devel, minimal     PHP scripting language
php       remi-8.0     common [d], devel, minimal     PHP scripting language
php       remi-8.1     common [d], devel, minimal     PHP scripting language
php       remi-8.2     common [d], devel, minimal     PHP scripting language

Hint: [d]efault, [e]nabled, [x]disabled, [i]nstalled

As you can see above, the (d) tag is next to PHP 8.1, which you will need to reset and change to install PHP 7.4.

Install PHP 7.4

Now you need to enable PHP 7.4 on AlmaLinux 9 with the command below:

sudo dnf module install php:remi-7.4 -y

If you would like to install the most commonly used extensions for PHP 7.4, use the following command:

sudo dnf install php-cli php-fpm php-curl php-mysqlnd php-gd php-opcache php-zip php-intl php-common php-bcmath php-imap php-imagick php-xmlrpc php-json php-readline php-memcached php-redis php-mbstring php-apcu php-xml php-dom php-redis php-memcached php-memcache

To verify your PHP 7.4 installation on AlmaLinux 9, you can check its version:

php -v

Output
PHP 7.4.33 (cli) (built: Dec 19 2022 13:12:58) ( NTS )
Copyright (c) The PHP Group
Zend Engine v3.4.0, Copyright (c) Zend Technologies

Configure PHP-FPM To Run As a Nginx User

By default on AlmaLinux 9, the PHP-FPM service is designed to be run (Apache) user. If you are using Nginx you need to make configuration changes at (www.conf).

You can open the file with your favorite text editor, here we use vi:

sudo vi /etc/php-fpm.d/www.conf

Find the user and group directives and change them to Nginx as shown below:

user = nginx
group = nginx

When you are done, save and close the file.

Reload the PHP-FPM service to apply the changes:

sudo systemctl restart php-fpm

The Nginx server block needs the following example below for Nginx to process the PHP files.

Below is an example for all server {} blocks that process PHP files that need the location ~ .php$ added.

    location ~ \.php$ {
        try_files $uri =404;
        fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php-fpm/www.sock;
        fastcgi_index   index.php;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        include fastcgi_params;
    }

For more information, you can visit the PHP Documentation page.