Since I moved away from 1&1 IONOS, updates will be irregular!

1&1 IONOS has been a fairly early adopter to PHP 7 in their Shared Webhosting and provides regular updates to the latest version in every 7.x branch. However, for some reason the latest version available in the shell is runnning behind. This could get you into trouble, for example when using composer, where your desired package has a requirement higher than the version available. This article delivers a solution.

Login to your environment with ssh and follow these steps:

• PHP 7.4

  wget --content-disposition https://mr42.me/dl/php74
  tar xjf php74.tar.bz2
  echo "alias php='LD_LIBRARY_PATH=~/bin/lib ~/bin/php74-cli'" >> ~/.bashrc
  

• PHP 8.0

  wget --content-disposition https://mr42.me/dl/php80
  tar xjf php80.tar.bz2
  echo "alias php='LD_LIBRARY_PATH=~/bin/lib ~/bin/php80-cli'" >> ~/.bashrc
  

You can either log out and log back in, or run . ~/.bashrc in order to run php on the command line.

PHP 6 was the major PHP version that never came to light. It was supposed to feature full support for Unicode in the core, but this effort was too ambitious with too many complications arising. The predominant reasons why version 6 was skipped for this new major version are as follows:

• To prevent confusion. Many resources were written about PHP 6 and much of the community knew what was featured in it. PHP 7 is a completely different beast with entirely different focuses (specifically on performance) and entirely different feature sets. Thus, a version has been skipped to prevent any confusion or misconceptions surrounding what PHP 7 is.
• To let sleeping dogs lie. PHP 6 was seen as a failure and a large amount of PHP 6 code still remains in the PHP repository. It was therefore seen as best to move past version 6 and start afresh on the next major version, version 7.