How can one install PHP 7.4,7.3 or 7.2 on an Amazon Linux 2 virtual machine. Amazon Linux is an operating system designed to provide a stable, secure, and high performance execution environment for applications running on Amazon EC2. This guide will show you how you can easily install PHP 7.x on Amazon Linux 2 instance running in AWS or your development environment.

Confirm that the amazon-linux-extras package is installed:

$ which amazon-linux-extras
/usr/bin/amazon-linux-extras

If the command doesn’t return any output, then install the package that will configure the repository:

sudo yum install -y amazon-linux-extras

Install PHP 7.4, 7.3, 7.2 on Amazon Linux 2

Let’s confirm that PHP 7.x topic is available in our Amazon Linux 2 machine:

$ sudo  amazon-linux-extras | grep php
 15  php7.2                   available    \
 17  lamp-mariadb10.2-php7.2  available    \
 31  php7.3                   available    \
 42  php7.4                   available    [ =stable ]
 51  php8.0                   available    [ =stable ]

As we can see all PHP 7 topics, in this example we’ll enable php7.4 topic.

sudo amazon-linux-extras enable php7.4
sudo amazon-linux-extras disable php5.4

Now install PHP packages from the repository.

sudo yum clean metadata
sudo yum install php php-{pear,cgi,common,curl,mbstring,gd,mysqlnd,gettext,bcmath,json,xml,fpm,intl,zip,imap}

Accept installation of PHP 7 packages on Amazon Linux 2.

....
Transaction Summary
========================================================================================================================================================
Install  12 Packages (+14 Dependent packages)

Total download size: 15 M
Installed size: 61 M
Is this ok [y/d/N]: y

Check default PHP version:

$ php --version
PHP 7.4.5 (cli) (built: Apr 23 2020 00:10:21) ( NTS )
Copyright (c) The PHP Group
Zend Engine v3.4.0, Copyright (c) Zend Technologies

To install PHP 7.2, make sure you disable 7.4 and 7.3 then enable 7.2.

sudo amazon-linux-extras disable php7.4
sudo amazon-linux-extras disable php7.3
sudo amazon-linux-extras enable php7.2
sudo yum install php php-{pear,cgi,common,curl,mbstring,gd,mysqlnd,gettext,bcmath,json,xml,fpm,intl,zip,imap}

Confirm version of PHP.

$ php -v
PHP 7.2.31 (cli) (built: Jul  2 2020 23:17:00) ( NTS )
Copyright (c) 1997-2018 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v3.2.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2018 Zend Technologies

Similar commands should be used when installing PHP 7.3 on Amazon Linux 2.

sudo amazon-linux-extras disable php7.4
sudo amazon-linux-extras disable php7.2
sudo amazon-linux-extras enable php7.3
sudo yum install php php-{pear,cgi,common,curl,mbstring,gd,mysqlnd,gettext,bcmath,json,xml,fpm,intl,zip,imap}

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