Work and play in PHP 7.4 & PHP 8.0

Roberto Rivera — Sun, 31 Jan 2021 08:06:06 +0000

The classic Dev dilemma, you get comfortable in a language or tool and then there is an update. Do your projects stay with the version that you know? Or do you try and upgrade to a new version as soon as possible?

I decided to try and find a way to work in 7.4 but experiment with 8.0. Eventually all of my newer projects will adopt the latest versions but I want to be flexible.

I found working with two different versions of PHP on the same device to be very hard. I tried to find different methods but weren't entirely happy with the results. Therefore, I created a PHP toggle! A Bash script that will allow users to comfortably switch between versions with a quick command.

Now to preface, I'm totally new to Linux and Bash and realize that there are probably better ways of doing this. But I thought I would share what I did and maybe work shop things. See if this helps other people.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# shellcheck disable=SC2005
modExists="$(php -v:0:7)"
modExists=${modExists:0:7}

case $modExists in
"PHP 8.0")
a2dismod php8.0
a2enmod php7.4
update-alternatives --set php /usr/bin/php7.4;;
"PHP 7.4")
a2dismod php7.4
a2enmod php8.0
update-alternatives --set php /usr/bin/php8.0;;
esac

php -v
systemctl restart apache2
systemctl status apache2

I've been using this for a while and so far it's been working like a charm. Happy Hacking everyone! I have a gist as well here:
toggle.sh

DEV Community: Roberto Rivera

Work and play in PHP 7.4 & PHP 8.0