What to Know About Upgrading to PHP7
PHP7 is here and our developers noticed some impressive speed improvements right off the bat. It’s important to keep your Magento server up-to-date for security and performance, but we recommend upgrading to PHP7 for noticeable Magento performance improvements. After some benchmark testing, we noticed a 70% decrease in page load time and 30% less memory consumption across the board on a base installation of Magento 1.9.
Our Lead Developer wrote some simple directions on upgrading to PHP7 from PHP5 on Ubuntu. These should be performed by a developer or system admin – Contact us for help on upgrading to PHP7 on any Magento install.
There’s only a couple of minor quirks, like not having dl() support which killed a couple of the extensions that had copy-protection on one site. There are a couple of minor things to do to make PHP7 work but it’s covered below.
If you’re ready to take the Magento/PHP7 plunge and are using Ubuntu, then this is how you can do it:
- Remove PHP5 (Warning: This will remove PHP5 from your system completely.)
- sudo apt-get purge php5-*
- Add the PHP7 repository
- sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php
- sudo apt-get update
- Install PHP7
- sudo apt-get install php7.0
- Install PHP7 components
- sudo apt-get install php7.0-cli php7.0-common libapache2-mod-php7.0 php7.0 php7.0-mysql php7.0-fpm php7.0-curl php7.0-json php7.0-cgi php7.0-mcrypt
- sudo service php7.0-fpm restart
- sudo service apache2 restart
- The Magento PHP7 Fix
- Inchoo has this ready in an easy-to-install extension: https://github.com/Inchoo/Inchoo_PHP7
Here are some common problems with Magento after installing PHP7 –
- If Apache is dumping plain text php instead of rendering it, then be sure that you’ve installed libapache2-mod-php7.0.
- sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-php7.0
- sudo service php7.0-fpm restart
- sudo service apache2 restart
- Getting a white page or error about mcrypt in Magento?
- sudo apt-get install php7.0-mcrypt
- sudo service php7.0-fpm restart
- sudo service apache2 restart
Still not feeling confident? If you aren’t ready for upgrading to PHP7 on your own, give the experts at InteractOne a call today at (513) 469-7042 or fill out our contact form.