Installing Nginx, PHP 7 on Centos 6.7

Posted on February 18, 2016  •  2 minutes  • 257 words  •  Suggest Changes

Installing nginx and any version of PHP is not particular difficult, yet still I have to google it every time I do, so here below you find how I normally do it for virtual machines.

First I always update and install yum-cron, this will try and update nightly, great for sleep, even if I missed a bug in a important package, my servers will try to fix them-self.

yum update -y
yum install yum-cron
service yum-cron start
chkconfig yum-cron on

Next is some tools I install, most important :

yum install nano

Next lets get Nginx, I am now taking mainline by default, but stable is also good :

nano /etc/yum.repos.d/nginx.repo
[nginx]
name=nginx repo
# mainline : newest
baseurl=http://nginx.org/packages/mainline/centos/6/$basearch/
# stable : older, no new features
#baseurl=http://nginx.org/packages/centos/6/$basearch/
gpgcheck=0
enabled=1

Now we can go ahead and install Nginx from their repository , since Nginx is not in any “official” repository there is no problem with overlapping package names.

yum update -y
yum install nginx

Then to install PHP7 (or PHP 5.4, 5.5, 5.6), Centos has 5.3.3 as default… its kinda old. (although Centos patches bugs, so its save to use !) To get a newer version we need to install both epel repo and an external repo, I like webtatic, but there are others that will work to.

rpm -Uvh https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-6.noarch.rpm
rpm -Uvh https://mirror.webtatic.com/yum/el6/latest.rpm

Then to install PHP and some extra’s.

yum update
yum install php70w-fpm php70w-opcache php70w-gd php70w-mysql php70w-mcrypt

note that this will install fpm to work with Nginx, for Apache, you would need php70w.

happy coding!