The TutsPlus.com site has a new tutorial posted showing you how to upgrade your Linux server to run PHP 7.0, the latest major release of the PHP language.

PHP 7 was released last December. Once you've tested your code locally to run on it, it's time to upgrade your production server. Generally, I found that most of my sites run well on it.

However, I suspect that not many sites have upgraded yet. It's often safer and easier to stay on older releases. [...] But PHP 7 has now been out for nearly a year.

In today's episode, I'll walk you through my recommended approach to upgrading to PHP 7 on Ubuntu 14.x and resolving problems with PHPMyAdmin, which a lot of early upgraders ran into.

He starts by helping you identify any customizations that you might have related to PHP 5, specifically related to configuration options. He then provides the commands to remove PHP 5 packages from the system and add in the "ondrej/php" PPA for apt-get as the source for the PHP 7 packages. After a quick apt-get cleanup, he includes the commands to install the "php7" packages, enable a few extra modules and getting phpMyAdmin back up and in working order.

Following up on his previous post about date/time handling and localization, Simon Holywell has posted an update with information about using the "Intl" extension for PHP to get it working with the more powerful PHP DateTime handling.

I wrote about localising dates (and other data) in a recent blog post, but unfortunately there were some shortcomings where time zones were concerned. As I alluded to in that post there is a way around this via the Intl extension that exposes a simple API to format DateTime instances. Thankfully this follow up post will be quite short as the setup is very simple for those of you on Ubuntu/Debian you can use the repositories.

He includes the commands you'll need to install the extension (via apt-get), compile it via the "pecl" command and update your php.ini file to enable it. He also includes some code examples showing how to use the IntlDateFormatter handling to work with dates, formats and calendars.

In this tutorial on the XPertDeveloper site today they show you the "quick and not-so-dirty" way to get PHP + Apache + MySQL set up on a Ubuntu machine (from packages).

I have started working with Ubuntu 11.10 and my first task was to install PHP, Apache and MySQL in that. This is because without these three things computer is useless for PHP Developer. So Here I am sharing this article which shows how to install PHP, MySQL and Apache and configure with each other. This would be very useful for newbies, who have just jumped into web developing.

The process mostly consists of installing a few packages - mysql-server, mysql-client, apache2, php5 libapache2-mod-php5 (as well as several others for various PHP extension support) - and starting up the default Apache server.

In this new post to his blog Chad Lung walks you through the process of getting Lighttpd (web server), PHP and MySQL installed on a Ubuntu-based system. His specific installation is 10.10, but the instructions can be translated easily to most common versions.

Sometimes you don’t want Apache for your web server whatever your reasons might be. There are other options like Nginx and Lighttpd, today I’ll setup Lighttpd along with PHP (via FastCGI) and MySQL.

The Ubuntu package manager (apt-get/aptitude) takes a lot of the work out of it for you, installing the packages and dependencies. A few minimal changes to some configuration files for FastCGI and configuring the Lighttpd server and you'll be up and running in no time.

On the TechTatva.com site today there's a new tutorial posted about getting the Cherokee web server set up and running PHP5 FPM. It's a few simple steps to install and a few clicks around the GUI to get things configured.

In this "how to" we will see how to setup cherokee on Ubuntu with PHP5-FPM (FastCGI Process Manager). Although the cherokee CookBook claims that "If PHP-fpm binaries are found, those will be prioritized over the regular binaries." it turns out that the latest stable version of cherokee in Launchpad gives errors while enabling

A few calls to "apt-get" install some packages (Cherokee and php5-fpm) and changes to the Cherokee configuration - handled through its web-based interface - are all that's needed to add a new behavior rule to the default vServer to link to the PHP5-FPM install (as FastCGI).

Padraic Brady has a quick post in response to some questions he saw about installing PHP on a Ubuntu system (9.10/Karmic Koala) via apt-get.

As there was some exclaimation marks on Twitter about this, here's a quick article on installing PHP 5.3.1 on Ubuntu 9.10 using aptitude or apt-get. I use aptitude primarily, but the installation uses normal .deb files. Since Ubuntu will not officially adopt PHP 5.3 until next April, the PHP 5.3 debs I use are pulled from the Dotdeb Debian "Lenny" repositories. These are perfectly compatible with Ubtuntu 9.10 and only require the manual installation of two extra dependencies which Ubuntu cannot resolve itself.

You'll need to add in some new sources to your list, but after that it's a pretty simple process to pull in the PHP 5.3 packages, add in a few extra libraries and then run the update for apt-get to install it all.

In this new post Robert Basic expands on an older post about installing LAMP on a Ubuntu system by tossing Subversion (SVN) into the mix.

This post is a rewrite of one of my older posts, Ubuntu as a dev machine, but this time I’ll explain also how to setup a basic SVN besides the LAMP. [...] Once again, I’m installing it under VirtualBox (VB).

He includes all of the apt-get commands you'll need as well as configuration options and commands to get your first project imported into subversion.

PHP developers working on Debian have one more reason to be happy with their choice of linux distributions - as Derick Reathans notes, XDebug has been added as an apt-getable package to the Debian systems.

Since a few days, there is a new package in Debian: php5-xdebug. After a few years of talking licenses, due to the help of Martin Meredith and Francois Marier Xdebug can finally be installed with apt-get.

XDebug is a debugging and profiling tool that adds additional information (more than just the usual "error on line..." sort of thing) to the output of your PHP scripts. It also adds more complex functionality like profiling and code coverage reports run on your applications.

Hasin Hayder has a new post to his blog today about trying to set up the PHP extension for interaction between his scripts and the subversion version control libraries on his Ubuntu linux system.

I was trying to interact with my subversion repositories using PHP yesterday and I knew that PECL has a extension named "SVN" for PHP users. So I tried to install in in my machine by when I tried to install it with the [following] command it always failed.

The trick to his hint is to install the libsvn-dev package (found via a search with apt-get) and installed and compiled in to the PHP installation with the extension. Sample code is included.

In a new post today, Fernando Bassani puts the PHP-Java bridge to the test in an effort to stretch the abilities of PHP to fit his needs.

Last week, in a meeting with my boss and another developer, we've decided to test the PHP/Java Bridge. As the project that we are currenlty working (a manager for PLC networks) has grown a lot, we have noticed that we need to do some things that PHP can't do by itself. We often use shell_exec() to execute some shell commands. But it wouldn't fit in this case, as we need some specific things.

He goes through the decision process on with implementation to use (they went with the Java bridge) and the process of getting it set up and working on a Ubuntu system. Sample code to test that everything's in working order is included.