How To Install PHP 7 On A cPanel/WHM Server With EasyApache 3
Latest versions of cPanel come with EasyApache 4 which provides lots of new features like native support for multiple PHP versions, PHP 7 support, very fast, etc. So it is recommended to migrate to EasyApache 4. However, if you cannot migrate EasyApache 4 because of some reason (Example: Tomcat support), you will have to compile the PHP 7 manually from source.
To migrate to EasyApache for, just run the below command. cPanel will try to build a matching PHP setup using EasyApache 4.
/scripts/migrate_ea3_to_ea4 --run
If anything goes wrong during the upgrade process you can always go back with /scripts/migrate_ea3_to_ea4 –revert –run
Manually install PHP 7
Following steps are tested with cPanel 11.64.0.36 and CentOS 6.9 64 bit. The PHP handler should be suphp to get this working.
cd /usr/local/src/
wget http://php.net/distributions/php-7.0.22.tar.gz #Go to php.net site to find the latest version
tar xvf php-7.0.22.tar.gz
Build it.
#./configure --enable-bcmath --enable-calendar --enable-exif --enable-ftp --enable-gd-native-ttf --enable-libxml --enable-mbstring --enable-pdo=shared --enable-sockets --enable-zip --prefix=/usr/local/php70 --with-curl=/opt/curlssl/ --with-freetype-dir=/usr --with-gd --with-gettext --with-imap=/opt/php_with_imap_client/ --with-imap-ssl=/usr --with-jpeg-dir=/usr --with-kerberos --with-libdir=lib64 --with-libxml-dir=/opt/xml2/ --with-mcrypt=/opt/libmcrypt/ --with-mysqli --with-openssl=/usr --with-openssl-dir=/usr --with-pcre-regex=/opt/pcre --with-pdo-mysql=shared --with-pdo-sqlite=shared --with-pic --with-png-dir=/usr --with-xpm-dir=/usr --with-zlib --with-zlib-dir=/usr
You may add any additional parameters required. You can run ./configure --help to see all available options first.
Important: Do not forget to set the "--prefix=/usr/local/php70". Otherwise, your existing PHP installation will be lost.
make
make install
If everything is successful, the PHP binaries will be installed in "/usr/local/php70/bin/" directory.
Copy the default php.ini:
cp -pr /usr/local/src/php-7.0.22/php.ini-production /usr/local/php70/lib/php.ini
Add pdo,opcache, other modules to php.ini file.
echo "extension=pdo.so" >> /usr/local/php70/lib/php.ini
echo "extension=pdo_mysql.so" >> /usr/local/php70/lib/php.ini
echo "zend_extension=opcache.so" >> /usr/local/php70/lib/php.ini
Verify the installation
/usr/local/php70/bin/php -v
PHP 7.0.22 (cli) (built: Aug 5 2017 01:56:23) ( NTS )
Copyright (c) 1997-2017 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v3.0.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2017 Zend Technologies
with Zend OPcache v7.0.22, Copyright (c) 1999-2017, by Zend Technologies
Now link our new PHP 7 installation with Apache web server
Generate the PHP config:
cat > /usr/local/apache/conf/php70.conf << EOF
AddType application/x-httpd-php7 .php7 .php
suPHP_AddHandler application/x-httpd-php7
EOF
Add new handler to suphp
Edit the /opt/suphp/etc/suphp.conf and add below code, at the end of the handlers list to enable PHP7 handler.
;Handler for php-scripts
#... existing handlers are here ... put yours below them
application/x-httpd-php7="php:/usr/local/php70/bin/php-cgi"
Now add our custom php config file to EasyApache list so that the changes will not be lost future EasyApache builds.
There are two options here. You can either go into WHM and edit the post_virtualhost_global.conf file from there or you just run: vi /usr/local/apache/conf/includes/post_virtualhost_global.conf. Add the line below in that file and you should be all done.
Include /usr/local/apache/conf/php70.conf
Now restart Apache
service httpd restart
Configure a website To Use This new PHP 7
Add following code to .htaccess file(/home/username/public_html/.htaccess)
AddType application/x-httpd-php7 .php7 .php
