Install PHP 8.0 for laravel

Table of contents

Basics

In order to install recent versions of PHP you have to add a repository to your system. Ondrej Sury maintains that repository which is why in most tutorials you have to add his repository.

To see which versions are available to your current repositories you can use the command:

Please note that the following instructions are for Linux.

To see which php modules are available, you should first find which version of Ubuntu you have. You can do that with the following command:

cat /etc/os-release

Then you can navigate to https://packages.ubuntu.com, select your version and then search for PHP. For example for Bionic, you should go here.

Alternatively you can use apt:

sudo apt-cache search php | grep ^php8.0

As PHP evolves many modules are moved to core PHP which means that you do not have to install them separately in spite of the fact that many tutorials try to do so.

Install prerequisites

System prerequisites

 sudo apt install ca-certificates apt-transport-https software-properties-common

System required PPA

Add the Ondrej Sury PPA to have access to more recent versions of PHP:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php

Update the system repositories:

sudo apt update

Laravel listed requirements

Laravel 8.0 defines the following modules are requlred:

Documentation	Action needed
BCMath	Requires installation
CType	Already included in PHP 8.0 commons
Fileinfo	Already included in PHP 8.0 commons
JSON	Already included in PHP 8.0 commons
MbString	Requires installation
OpenSSL	Requires installation
PDO PHP
Tokenizer	Already included in PHP 8.0 commons
XML	Requires installation

Composer requirements

You can list the composer requirements with the following command:

php composer.phar check-platform-reqs

All In One command

The following command installs all of those mentioned above. Use it at your own risk:

sudo apt install openssl php8.0 php8.0-bcmath php8.0-mbstring php8.0-xml php8.0-curl php8.0-zip php8.0-mysql

Install PHP core

Install PHP core:

sudo apt install php8.0

Install modules

Required Modules

BCmath

sudo apt install php8.0-bcmath

Ctype

No need to install it separately.

FileInfo

No need to install it separately. For more info read here.

JSON

No need to install it after version 8. For more info read here.

Mbstring

sudo apt install php8.0-mbstring

OpenSSL

sudo apt install openssl

Tokenizer