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.

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.

Hannes Magnusson, in an effort to make it easier for developers to play with the latest shiny features of the current PHP development, has created a PPA for the latest daily status of the PHP project's trunk line of code.

There is still no public "development preview" or alpha release, but that doesn't mean we can't play around with it, report bugs, ensuring our apps still properly work with it etc etc etc. It is however a bit annoying needing to "go old-school" and fetch a snapshot and build it yourself though.

If you'd like to try it out for yourself (the generated Ubuntu packages), you can get more information over on the Launchpad page for the project. As always, feedback is welcome on the PHP internals list about your experiences.

In a new post to his blog Hannes Magnusson mentions that the PHP packages for Ubuntu linux installs are woefully out of date and can make a developer's live even more difficult than it already can be. It help ease the situation a bit, he's figured out how to provide custom PHP 5.3 packages to anyone who wants them through a service called Launchpad.

Launchpad makes it really easy to provide your own custom packages, and even has a vast build farm to build packages automatically for different architectures and different Ubuntu releases. The only down side is it doesn't build rpm packages.. Thats fine by me, but that would be really useful for those wishing to deploy on a RedHat based distro.

He took the current package and pulled out a lot of the setup to make a "vanilla" installation. You can then look over at the PHP 5.3 PPA he's provided on his Launchpad account and grab this most up to date package.