How to install PHP 8 on Ubuntu 20.04

Simple and light way to install the PHP 8 to Ubuntu 20.04.

Step 1: Enabling PHP Repository

Ondřej Surý, a Debian developer, maintains a repository that includes multiple PHP versions. To enable the repository , run:

sudo apt install software-properties-common
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php

Once the PPA is enabled, you can install PHP 8.

Step 2a: Install PHP 8.0 with Apache

sudo apt update
sudo apt install php8.0 libapache2-mod-php8.0

Once the packages are installed, we need to restart the Apache services.

sudo systemctl restart apache2

Step 2b: Install PHP 8.0 with Nginx

Nginx doesn’t have built-in support for processing PHP files. We’ll use PHP-FPM (“fastCGI process manager”) to handle the PHP files.

sudo apt update
sudo apt install php8.0-fpm

Once the installation is completed, the FPM service will start automatically. To check the status of the service, run

systemctl status php8.0-fpm

Output:

php8.0-fpm.service - The PHP 8.0 FastCGI Process Manager
     Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/php8.0-fpm.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
     Active: active (running) since Thu 2020-12-03 16:10:47 UTC; 6s ago

You can restart you Nginx serve with the command:

sudo systemctl restart nginx