In this new post to her site Lorna Mitchell show you how to get both PHP 7 and PHP 5.6 installed on a Ubuntu-based system with the help of a custom PPA (Personal Package Archive).

PHP 7 is released but for those of us who don't usually compile our own PHP, it can be a long wait for our preferred distro to release the packages we want. For Ubuntu, I'm using a PPA which allows both PHP 5.6 and PHP 7.0 to be installed, including things like extensions, at the same time. It was very easy to set up (I'm running Ubuntu 15.10 but this process should also work on older versions back to at least 14.04 which is the previous LTS) so here's a quick walkthrough of what I did.

She then shows you how to:

• Add the PPA to your system (this one)
• Install the new versions as expected with apt-get
• Configuring and switching between versions as needed

She ends the post talking about extensions and the issues that could come up when compiling them against each of the versions. This includes installation instructions so you can easily enable and disable the extensions much like the "sites available" some Apache installations use.