How to setup PHP7.1, Apache 2.2 on Amazon Linux

OK I had no plan to make this post but recently I spent quite a few time to figure it out so thought to make it as a post for self and others who come across issue to deal with this simply thing otherwise.

Alright, let’s proceed!

Below is the details of my Amazon Distro:

 cat /etc/*-release
NAME="Amazon Linux AMI"
VERSION="2017.09"
ID="amzn"
ID_LIKE="rhel fedora"
VERSION_ID="2017.09"
PRETTY_NAME="Amazon Linux AMI 2017.09"
ANSI_COLOR="0;33"
CPE_NAME="cpe:/o:amazon:linux:2017.09:ga"
HOME_URL="http://aws.amazon.com/amazon-linux-ami/"
Amazon Linux AMI release 2017.09

Repo setting

Before we proceed, first make sure that you are downloading stuff from the right repository. Remove all irrelevant repos, specially remi-safe.

wget https://mirror.webtatic.com/yum/el6/latest.rpm
sudo yum install latest.rpm
sudo vi /etc/yum.repos.d/webtatic.repo  'set repo enables
sudo yum clean all

You can see list of available repos, if all goes well you should see something like below:

yum repolist
Loaded plugins: priorities, update-motd, upgrade-helper
repo id                repo name                                          status
!amzn-main/latest      amzn-main-Base                                     5,883
!amzn-updates/latest   amzn-updates-Base                                  1,353
!nodesource/x86_64     Node.js Packages for Enterprise Linux 7 - x86_64      80
!webtatic/x86_64       Webtatic Repository EL6 - x86_64                     243
repolist: 7,559

Alright, we now have correct repo setup, it’s time to install things

Apache 2.2 Installation

yum install http httpd-devel

Make sure it’s Apache2.2. I tried Apache2.4 but it gives error:

/etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf: Syntax error on line 6 of /etc/httpd/conf.d/php.conf: Cannot load modules/libphp7.so

So I rather will settle with Apache 2.2

Check whether httpd is up or not:

sudo service httpd restart

PHP 7.1 Installation

Two different PHP Packages need to be installed:

• PHP Module for Apache so that php based websites can work
• PHP CLI for executing scripts from command line. It’s needed for php artisan.

sudo yum install --enablerepo=webtatic php71w

If installed well you should be able to execute PHP. In my case phpinfo() shows:

Now, we need to install PHP CLI:

sudo yum install --enablerepo=webtatic php71w-cli

and if all installed well:

[ec2-user@ip..]$ php -v
PHP 7.1.14 (cli) (built: Feb  4 2018 09:25:54) ( NTS )
Copyright (c) 1997-2018 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v3.1.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2018 Zend Technologies

OK before I quit, we gotta install PDO and MySQL libraries:

sudo yum install php71w-pdo
sudo yum install php71w-mysqlnd

By doing php-m it should show PDO available.

Conclusion

In this post I tried to make your life easier by making this quick and short post so that others don’t waste hours to figure things out.