Upgrading PHP from 5.3 to 5.5 in ubuntu 12.04 LTS

In Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, the PHP version installed using

sudo apt-get install php5-fpm

is PHP5.3. If you want to use Yii2 or Laravel framework, the PHP version must be at least 5.4+, so you need to upgrade.

Upgrade steps

Initialization operation:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python-software-properties

Update PPA source:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php5

If you just want to upgrade to 5.4, execute the following command:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php5-oldstable

Then execute the update and upgrade:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Execute the command php -v will Found that the update was successful.

Note 1

If nginx was previously configured to listen to port 9000 to process PHP, it must be changed to listen to the UNIX socket, otherwise the PHP page cannot be opened correctly. Change

fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;

to

fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;

Note 2 The difference between

upgrade and dist-upgrade:

dist-upgrade will identify and handle the situation when dependencies change, while upgrade will not handle this situation.