Upgrading PHP Version on NGINX with PHP-FPM

In this tutorial, we will show you how to upgrade PHP to version 7.4 on a web server with Nginx and php-fpm (based on Ubuntu or Debian Linux). PHP 7.4 contains a large number of updates to improve the stability, security, and performance of your web server and is highly recommended to use.

Add latest repositories and update package lists:

$ apt-add-repository ppa:ondrej/php
$ apt-add-repository ppa:ondrej/nginx
$ apt update

Install new PHP and PHP-FPM packages:

$ apt install -y php7.4 php7.4-cli php7.4-common php7.4-fpm

Check the installed PHP version:

$ php -v

PHP 7.4.22 (cli) (built: Oct 14 2021 13:07:59) (NTS)

Install additional libraries and modules for WordPress (optional):

$ apt install -y php7.4-mysql php7.4-mysqli php7.4-dom php7.4-simplexml php7.4-ssh2 php7.4-xml php7.4-xmlreader php7.4-curl php7.4-exif php7.4-ftp php7.4-gd php7.4-iconv php7.4-imagick php7.4-json php7.4-mbstring php7.4-posix php7.4-sockets php7.4-tokenize php7.4-pdo php7.4-sqlite3 php7.4-ctype php7.4-fileinfo php7.4-zip php7.4-exif

Modify the /etc/php/7.4/fpm/php.ini file. Uncomment the cgi.fix_pathinfo parameter and set it to 0.

; cgi.fix_pathinfo provides *real* PATH_INFO/PATH_TRANSLATED support for CGI. PHP's

; previous behaviour was to set PATH_TRANSLATED to SCRIPT_FILENAME, and to not grok

; what PATH_INFO is. For more information on PATH_INFO, see the cgi specs. Setting

; this to 1 will cause PHP CGI to fix its paths to conform to the spec. A setting

; of zero causes PHP to behave as before. Default is 1. You should fix your scripts

; to use SCRIPT_FILENAME rather than PATH_TRANSLATED.

; http://php.net/cgi.fix-pathinfo

cgi.fix_pathinfo=0

Restart the PHP-FPM service:

$ systemctl restart php7.4-fpm.service

Check that there is a new socket:

$ ls -1 /run/php/

php-fpm.sock
php7.2-fpm.pid
php7.2-fpm.sock
php7.4-fpm.pid
<strong>php7.4-fpm.sock</strong>

It remains to change the PHP-FPM version in the NGINX configuration file (specify a new socket):

$ nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/default

...
location ~ \.php$ {
                include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
                fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php7.4-fpm.sock;
        }
...

Check your NGINX configuration and if everything is OK, restart it.

$ nginx -t

nginx: the configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf syntax is ok
nginx: configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf test is successful

$ systemctl reload nginx.service